Nothing stirred in the relentless midday heat. The gum trees appeared exhausted, drained almost of life. Hidden in their foliage crouched the Tjapwurung (Aboriginal) hunters, their long sharp spears poised to unleash at a moment’s notice. The giant birds that were the objects of their attention moved slowly, unsuspecting. Standing over six and a half feet tall, their ‘heads … as high as the hills’, these birds were known to the Tjapwurung as mihirung paringmal (see pictures below). They were feared for their vicious kicks that might ‘kill a man’ yet prized for the amount of meat that even one would provide for the tribe. From around the time of this particular hunt, between 5000 and 10,000 years ago in southern Australia, it is reported that these people had ‘a tradition respecting the existence … of such very large birds’, now long extinct. The details of precisely how people hunted them have also reached us today. Across an almost unbelievably large slice of time.
Such ancient stories are not unprecedented but neither are they commonplace. Consider that from Oregon (western USA) where the Klamath people have a story about a time when there was no Crater Lake, only a giant volcano towering over the landscape where the lake is now. Besotted with a local beauty, the volcano god threatened the Klamath with fury and fire unless she acquiesced but her people called upon their protector – a rival deity – who fought the volcano god, eventually causing his home to collapse in on him and fill with water. For the next 7700 years, the Klamath taught each new generation anew the importance of avoiding Crater Lake (pictured below) lest they disturb the evil god within … 7700 years, did I read that right? You did. With remarkable precision, geologists have determined that this is the time of the terminal eruption of the former volcano – Mt Mazama – and the creation of the landscape we see today. The Klamath were there all along and their memories of that cataclysmic event have reached us today.
Like Aboriginal Australians, the Klamath people have become literate only quite recently in their history. Before that happened, their societies were oral. Information was passed on verbally from one generation to the next. In those societies where cultural turnover resulting from influxes of new/different peoples occurred regularly, such stories have not generally been preserved so long. But in those places where people were effectively isolated from outside influences for thousands of years, it is possible that some such stories may have endured this long.
Australia – the island continent – is roughly the same size as the conterminous United States. People arrived there first around 65,000 years ago, island hopping their way across the Wallace Line, that deep ocean gap that proved such an impenetrable barrier to other animals and explains why Australia has such a singular biota. Yet except for a few peripheral contacts, it seems that Australian cultures evolved in isolation for most of the last 65,000 years, at least until Europeans settled there in 1788. This proved a perfect situation for the construction and preservation of oral traditions – ancient stories – one that was made even better by the indisputable harshness of the environment in most parts of Australia. After Antarctica, it is the world’s driest continent, most of it is desert, and its climate is determined less by annual seasons and more by the interannual uncertainties of the El Niño Southern Oscillation. For tribes of the nomadic Aboriginal hunter-gatherers in Australia, the imperative of passing on precise information about the nature and possibilities of its harsh terrain was clear. Without such information, painstakingly accumulated by generations of your ancestors, your children might not survive. It seems to have been an effective strategy. In 1958 when anthropologist Donald Thomson contacted the Pintupi (Bindibu) Aboriginal people who lived in Australia’s forbidding Central Desert (seen below), he spent enough time with them to note that ‘they have adapted themselves to that bitter environment so they laugh deeply and grow the fattest babies in the world’.
Some of the world’s oldest stories come from Australia, their minimum ages able to be roughly calculated. These stories recall the time when the ocean surface was significantly lower than it is today, when the shoreline was much further out to sea, and where across lands now underwater the people roamed freely and shaped their history. For example, more than three miles (5 km) off the east coast of northern Queensland lies Fitzroy Island, the Yidiɲɖi Aboriginal name for which is gabaɽ, meaning the ‘lower arm’ of a former mainland promontory, a situation that could have been true only when the sea level was 98 feet (30 m) or more lower than today. After the last ice age ended about 18,000 years ago, land-ice began melting and sea level began rising. Along almost every coast in the world we know how this process unfolded – when it began and ended, how low it was at particular times. Around Fitzroy Island, the ocean was most recently 98 feet lower about 9960 years ago. This means that if the original naming of Fitzroy Island as gabaɽ dates from a time when it was attached to the mainland – and there is no good reason to suspect otherwise – then this memory is almost ten millennia old. Passed on orally without being lost through some 400 generations.
Similar drowning stories come from many other places along the coast of Australia and have also been identified along some coasts of India and northwest Europe. Such ancient stories are generally less well-preserved here, often having slipped into the realm of legend and myth. One common story from the Brittany coast recalls how a city named Ys existed in the Baie de Douarnenez at a time when the ocean surface was lower than today. King Gradlon, who ruled from Ys, had protected it from the ocean by building elaborate sea defences that allowed excess water (overwash) to be drained from the city each low tide through a series of sluice gates. But at high tide one night, possessed by demons, his daughter Dahut opened the gates allowing the ocean in to flood the city and forcing its abandonment.
Today no-one is really sure where the city of Ys once was. Using the same reasoning as for Fitzroy Island, it seems possible that if Ys ever existed – and why should we believe such a persistent story to be invented – its drowning occurred more than 8000 years ago.
Pondering all this, we might ask two questions. How were such stories preserved for so long … and why were they preserved?
We rely so heavily today on the written word – absorbing the messages it conveys countless times each day – that it is difficult to imagine what life would be like without it. We need to learn something, we ‘look it up’ and find an answer in the pages of a book or at the touch of a screen button. But what happened before we had computers, before we had books, before anyone could read or write? Of course, people accumulated knowledge based on both their experiences and on what their forebears had experienced … and told them about. Just because people could not preserve that knowledge in writing did not mean they could not accumulate, synthesize and communicate it. Many oral societies had rigid methods of inter-generational knowledge transfer, especially in places like Australia where knowledge was key to survival. And we know that knowledge was communicated not only in words and stories but also through song, dance and performance. Even ancient rock art (like that below) may have been created mostly as memory aids, prompts to help storytellers recall particular pieces of information.
But why preserve stories so long? The main reason is about identity, to provide answers to the questions that define it for each of us. Who are we? Where do we fit in the bigger picture of humanity? How did our group contribute to the sum of human endeavour? And beyond identity, there is pragmatism. Where did our ancestors find food and water? Where were the best places they sheltered? When the ground rumbled and heaved, what did they do?
And so in oral societies, there were a range of ‘books’ kept only in the minds of those who had ‘read’ them. Knowledge was passed on by ‘reading’ those books out loud to young people, together with the imperative of one day reading them to others. And so down to us today has come a range of ancient stories – from memorable events like the formation of Crater Lake or the drowning of land along the Australian fringe to information we might consider altogether more pedestrian like the names of places and their associations.
Now pause to consider what this might all mean.
Humanity has direct memories of events that occurred ten millennia ago. This conclusion runs against the grain of inferences that many anthropologists and others have made about both the factual basis and the longevity of such oral traditions. Science more broadly has generally been dismissive of these, considering them largely anthropological curiosities, minutiae that define particular cultures. Now it seems, we are forced to look at oral traditions as potentially more meaningful, even when they have been dressed in the garb of myth and legend. How did we reach the stage where we need to make such a volte face? The best answer is that that our acquisition of literacy brought with it a degree of arrogance, a tendency to dismiss as worthless all knowledge that has not been written down.
And finally we might ask where is the ‘edge of memory’? How long can knowledge be transferred within oral societies before its essence becomes irretrievably lost and it needs to be re-discovered before it can be known again? My recent book, The Edge of Memory, asks this very question, concluding that under optimal conditions such knowledge might endure 10-20,000 years but no longer. Any more than this and it slips over the edge of the abyss and is lost to humanity … perhaps to the point where we might doubt it ever even existed.
Much of this research was published in 2018 in my book The Edge of Memory. Parts of this page were extracted from my article, The Oldest True Stories in the World, published in SAPIENS in October 2018 and freely available to read here).