Explain why it is more difficult to track the spread of an idea than of a historical phenomenon such as politics

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

ANSWER:
Ideas do not have a set time or concrete reference that one can point to and say, it initiated at this point. The book uses the example of eating pork, noting that it was forbidden in Egypt, ritualized in Southeast Asia, and probably also forbidden in Iran. We can only speculate about preliterate societies, whereas in Egypt, Israel, and later Islam, some explanations were given in the religious literature. The original prohibition of pork in Egypt came from its affiliation with the evil god Set, but there is no explanation for this affiliation. Religious society in Egypt had any number of totems affiliated with various gods, but without a concrete explanation of why. In third-millennium Iran, archaeologists have found small figurines of pigs, meaning they were known to the culture, but no remains of pig bones, indicating they were not eaten; however, absent any literature for explanation, one can only hypothesize (or guess) about the role of pigs. The lack of real evidence is problematic to historians, and the separation of material evidence from supposition is what divides anthropology from history.