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The Edge of Memory

published in 2018 by Bloomsbury Sigma, 288 pages

Consider that before your ancestors became literate – able to read and write – most knowledge was transmitted orally from one generation to the next.  This is how people learned.  And it was a process that has dominated the lives of modern humans for most of the two hundred thousand years or so that we have been striding the earth.  So where is that knowledge now?  Most is lost, it was never written down.  Lost forever. 

But over the last decade or so we have learned more and more about the nature of orally-transmitted knowledge, especially from studying some of the world’s most-enduring cultures and the stories that define them.  We now know that the volume of knowledge passed across these rivers of time was extraordinary, far greater than most people expected.  Not for nothing was the knowledge that each new generation of Indigenous Australians had to learn called the Dreaming Library. 

The focus of this book is on how long this knowledge can last, the longevity of human memory.  In many cases, this can be quite precisely determined, especially when memories recall dramatic natural events.  Like the formation of Crater Lake (Oregon, USA) 7600 years ago or the drowning of the Great Barrier Reef (Australia) more than 10,000 years ago.  This book shows these are not isolated examples, suggesting that in oral societies the edge of memory perhaps lay this far back. For

” … we cannot readily measure the cognitive abilities of non-literate people in a non-literate world by our own – the abilities of literate people inhabiting a literate world.  Naturally we would be inclined to undervalue those of our non-literate forebears.  And we see such bias in hundreds of instances that have led to an orthodoxy that memories communicated only orally mostly last only a few hundred years.  But what if we could prove that they could last far far longer?  That would stir things up.  That might force us to re-evaluate our assumptions about our non-literate ancestors” (page 31).

More on this here.

Towards the end of the book, I conclude –

” … numerous examples in this book demonstrate that some of the discoveries we have made through scientific investigations which we regard as “new” knowledge are in fact “old” knowledge … Our ancestors witnessed the rising of ocean levels after the end of the last ice age and the often-dramatic changes it wrought in coastal landscapes worldwide.  In some places – Australia, northwest Europe, India – people successfully passed on their observations of coastal drowning for hundreds of generations into the age of literacy and hence down to us today.  What science has discovered in the last hundred years or so about postglacial sea-level rise confirms the eyewitness accounts of our ancestors, not the other way round” (pages 201-202).

More on this here.

The Edge of Memory is written for a non-specialist readership.  It has been well reviewed (see here) and publicized (see here).  In January 2019, besides the piles of science magazines, The Edge of Memory was the only book that Dr Karl Kruszelnicki had on his bedside table.

The Edge of Memory is available from Bloomsbury and all good bookstores; a short interview at Abbey’s Bookshop in Sydney is available here.  It is also available as an audio book.

Reviews of The Edge of Memory can be found here. The list of chapters is here.