So you think the Loch Ness Monster never existed? That the story is a cunningly cobbled-together fiction intended to boost tourist interest in an otherwise unrelentingly dull (only to some) part of mid Scotland? Think again.
The embryonic science of geomythology is breathing new life into such stories, legitimising the essence of some, and opening up the possibility that other such folk memories may not be pure fiction but actually based on memories of actual events once observed by our ancestors. Lacking the scientific understanding available to us today, these people contextualised such observations in ways that made sense to them. Keen that their descendants should know what had happened, not least should happen again, many such stories were passed on (commonly orally) from one generation to the next. Invariably cloaked in multiple layers of embellishment, some stories have survived until today, available to be unpicked by curious scientists.
Science has long vilified those who argue for the existence of giant saurians lurking in the depths of Loch Ness but there has been some rehabilitation of ‘monster sightings’. The respected geologist, Luigi Piccardi, who has done much to make the novel field of geomythology respectable, has argued that observations of ‘Nessie’ are no more than the unusual agitation of the lake’s water surface during an earthquake. He also argues that many temples built during the Classical period in the eastern Mediterranean were intentionally built over geological fissures from which escaping neurotoxic gases might cause those sitting above them – like Pythia (shown below) in the Oracle at Delphi – to go into a trance in which they could reputedly foresee future events.
The Pacific Islands, where most of my research over the past thirty years has focused, has stories about past natural events – massive eruptions and earthquakes, giant waves, for instance – that have been regarded as largely apocryphal. I have focused on some of the stories from Pacific Island cultures about ‘vanished islands’, stories that come from almost every part of this vast region – nearly one third of the earth’s surface. The idea of an entire island disappearing rapidly seems instinctively implausible, the stuff of Atlantean fantasy, yet there are many such stories in the Pacific that seem quite believable at their cores.
Take the example of Teonimenu, which probably disappeared some 400 years ago, between the islands of Makira and Ulawa in the central Solomon Islands. While most local traditions remember its disappearance as the act of a vengeful cuckold, the details about the accompanying series of tsunami waves and the location of Teonimenu on the crest of a steep-sided underwater ridge, suggest this was a result of an earthquake-induced landslip.
Similar stories have been collected from central Vanuatu, where an island named Vanua Mamata abruptly disappeared about 1870, probably as a result of an eruption-linked landslide on the underwater flanks of the giant Ambae Island volcano. With great difficulty, the survivors saved themselves, paddling north to settle on the island of Maewo where today they recall the loss of Vanua Mamata bifo bifo yet (long long ago).
Of course, there is a limit. And that limit has been crossed when you confront many of the stories about ‘sunken continents’ in the Pacific. It is a geological impossibility for anything other than a few small bits of true continent to sink and stories suggesting the entire Pacific (or indeed the entire Indian Ocean or the entire Atlantic) were once occupied by a single continent are demonstrably false. We’ve looked. That said, there is plenty to stoke the imagination – and even a few disingenuous geoscientists happy to add fuel to the fire. Take the ‘sunken city’ off the coast of Yonaguni Island in southwest Japan, which numerous people will assure you was once part of the continental empire of ‘Mu’ that formerly spanned the entire Pacific. There is no shred of real evidence of human structures off the Yonaguni coast (any more than there is of Mu) but for those untutored in the ways that sandstones and shales weather, it might appear there are giant ‘carved’ steps and suchlike.
My involuntary introduction to geomythology came in mid-2000 when I was working at the international University of the South Pacific, based at its main teaching campus in Suva, Fiji. Having won some research funding and engaged three research assistants to accompany me to the Lau Islands of eastern Fiji, there was a coup; by far the nastiest of the four I have survived. It seemed the wrong time to do fieldwork so I set the research assistants to work in the university library’s Pacific Collection, searching for any published stories about Pacific Islander traditions of memorable geological events. The haul they recovered astonished me and led to me focusing attention on how the geological history of the Pacific might be illuminated by oral traditions.
One early example of this concerned myths about the formation of Nabukelevu (or Mt Washington), a striking volcano at the western end of Kadavu Island in Fiji. Long regarded by geologists as having last erupted tens of thousands of years ago, a legend from the people of nearby Ono Island suggested otherwise. Their story goes that one day the chief of Ono, who was accustomed to watch the sunset from a beach on Ono, one day found a mountain (Nabukelevu) had appeared at the end of Kadavu to the west and blocked the view. Livid, he flew to western Kadavu and fought with the chief of Nabukelevu but was overwhelmed. At one point he threw a giant spear at his rival, which missed but made a huge hole in the rock that you can see today (below).
The appearance of Nabukelevu suggests the growth of the volcano within human memory, which means about 3000 years in Fiji. So did the legend invalidate the science? It seems it did for, years later, when a road was cut around the foot of Nabukelevu, a section through the volcano’s flanks was exposed and showed a buried soil with pottery fragments (a sure sign of human occupation) overlain by freshly-deposited scoria. Clearly the legend was a more accurate indicator of the age of this volcano than science had once been.
In the last fifteen years, my interest in geomythology and respect for many oral traditions have burgeoned. Moving from the Pacific Islands to Australia in 2010 inevitably led me to educate myself more about Australian Aboriginal stories. What I have found was beyond my wildest imaginings.
It began in the library of the University of New England where I read many of the works of linguists who had studied Australian Aboriginal languages. While focused on the structure of the languages, many of these linguists also recalled – generally as illustrations of how language was used in storytelling – ancillary details of the oral traditions of many tribes. And for several of the coastal tribes, some of the most common stories recalled times when the ocean surface – sea level – was far lower than it is today and coastal lands were consequently far more extensive. With a research interest in climate change, especially its past history, I quickly realised that if these stories were true in the sense of being based on observation, they must have been passed down from generation to generation for several thousand years.
Understandably I paused. It is one thing to flirt with stories (like those in the Pacific Islands) that may be a few hundred years, even a millennium old, but asking people to take seriously a suggestion that oral traditions have been kept alive in intelligible form for more than seven thousand years. That is a big ask.
Yet sea level around Australia reached its present level about 7000 years ago and has not moved more than a couple of metres up and down since then. So any stories that talk about a time when sea level was, say 10-20 metres lower, must be older than that. So the research was published; was widely read, and even won a prize. It seems clear that Aboriginal groups in at least 22 locations all around the coast of Australia have preserved stories for more than 7000 years; in a few cases, perhaps more than 10,000 years. That is 280-400 generations.
To understand the graph below, take the stories from the Goulburn Islands that recall a time when sea level was some 18-20 metres lower, a condition last achieved here more than nine thousand years ago.
Now if Australian Aboriginal cultures were able to preserve stories so long, perhaps others of the world’s cultures also did so. There are not many examples, which suggests two things. One is that Australian Aboriginal society was especially adept at inter-generational knowledge transmission. Undoubtedly true. The other is that in other cultures perhaps we have been too quick to discount the lingering fragments of memory for what they really are. A bit more contentious.
Yet from Gujarat to Tamil Nadu in India, and in Gaelic cultures, from Brittany (France) to Cornwall and Wales (UK), there are stories about the consequences of the ocean rising across low-lying areas of coast. Many stories recall the ‘drowning’ of iconic cities and narrate the very human causes to which inundation was attributed. Such stories, celebrated in art and literature, are often regarded as integral to cultural identity. For this reason, attempts to explain them by science are sometimes resisted. Yet, viewed dispassionately, it seems possible that stories from both sides of the English Channel (La Manche), for example, recall times when it was much narrower than today, as was indeed the case several millennia ago.
What this research is showing is that knowledge can be transmitted orally and with a high degree of replication fidelity for thousands of years. This remarkable fact does not mean of course that all oral knowledge is that old, but it does open up possibilities for understanding the minds of our ancestors that we never dreamed possible. Or did we?
Much of this page is extracted from my article, Monsters in my Closet: A Journey into Geomythology, published in The Conversation in December 2017 and freely available to read here. It was also published as an Essay on Air (audio) on 29 March 2018 and is free to listen to here. I thank Axel Creach for help compiling the last map, which appears in my 2020 article, In anticipation of extirpation: how ancient peoples rationalized and responded to postglacial sea-level rise … and why it matters, published in the journal Environmental Humanities.