Comments
CaravelClerihew t1_iv46ctn wrote
The language used to convey these stories is at risk of loss, not the knowledge itself.
Drevil335 t1_iv4iozk wrote
That is seriously cool. I wonder if so few, if any, other oral traditions in other cultures proved so meticulously accurate.
Objective-Steak-9763 t1_iv5a8mj wrote
Inuit oral history said where missing boats had sunk 170 years later
Drevil335 t1_iv67pi4 wrote
That's pretty neat, but not even close to the scale of the extreme rigor of these Indigenous Australian oral traditions. 170 years is basically just two or three generations of elders; no one alive now was around back then, but the elderly bard recounting his tale to his people probably had a grandparent that was there to witness the events, or at least hear of them as they were happening. Therefore, the story would only need to be passed along a few times before it's present incarnation. In a game of telephone, which this can be compared to, the original phrase is usually mostly intact after being passed along to only two or three people.
To pass down a story from 7000 years ago, however, it would need to be told at least a hundred times, though probably many times more. That opens up a lot of opportunity for certain storytellers to add elements, and others to forget certain details, and yet more to slip up on certain figures or change names; the end result may be nothing like what actually happened in reality that inspired it. On this sort of timescale, it is also very possible for a story to simply stop being told, and thus be completely forgotten to posterity.
The example that you posted was cool, but not particularly unique. The article above tells of an oral storytelling tradition that has proved impeccably, perhaps uniquely, accurate even after millenia.
Skookum_J t1_iv5xaym wrote
There's a whole string of stories from Australia that talk about sea level rise. Some have been checked and found to tell accurate details from 10,000 years ago.
There's also the stories around Crater Lake, Oregon that have details suggesting they saw the eruption of Mt Mazama 7700 years ago.
Other stories have been suggested to contain oral history. But they're hard to prove or find evidence for. I know of outburst flood stories from N America and Asia, that are suggestive of ancient floods. But it's hard to disentangle ancient flood stories from more recent floods.
rubberseatbelt t1_ivo1o5t wrote
The Hindu faith has been a speculated to be 10,000 years old based on recent Brahmin prayer recordings.
Linguists were able to take the different prayers back through the different languages some originated in.
If I recall correctly, they were some prayers that could not be translated until anthologist walked by. Turns out, they were animal sounds and it's thought that the religion started from father's teaching sons about the animals that were found locally and then they began to be worshiped and the calls for the animals were the foundations of those prayers.
TheL0ngGame t1_iv5fjng wrote
not exactly an oral example, but the dogon ceremony which acknowledges sirius b.
AnybodyEmergency7295 t1_iv8cmb5 wrote
Well a lot of people kept oral traditions before they adopted the Latin alphabet, sadly most of them were forgotten and not written down...
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Quincyperson t1_iv5az75 wrote
So is this like an Australian Doggerland?
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InGenAche t1_iv3t14v wrote
Is the knowledge seriously at risk considering the plethora of recording abilities we now have or is it that the traditional means of storytelling is at risk?