There is compelling evidence that human memories can endure for thousands and thousands of years, passed on orally from one generation to the next. Of course, today, most of us are naturally sceptical about such a claim. This is because, unlike almost all our distant ancestors, we can access information at the turn of a page or at the tap of a button. But how did our ancestors, who could not read an alphabet and lacked conventient writing technology like pens and paper, access information that they wanted to know? They talked. The young listened to the old, who remembered what they had been told in stages throughout their lives, so they could now teach the young. Around the campfires each night, people gathered to hear the stories told by the elders, whose voluminous knowledge of the past provided the most advanced understandings of the world. These stories were not made up. They were factual, pragmatic, and intended to help each new generation navigate their way successfully through the land. They taught people how to survive.
And just as many of those bloodlines survived, so too did the stories that sustained them. Without knowledge, survival was impossible. If there was a drought, where would you find food? If you encountered an unfamiliar animal, would you cook it or flee from it? If the ground shook, what should you do? All this sounds trivial to us, but these were the kinds of dilemmas our ancestors faced in every part of the world. Today we dismiss these ancient stories as myths, fit only for entertainment. But they are not – nothing could be farther from the truth. These narratives are ancient science. Today, because we trust the written word more than the spoken one, we have repurposed these stories as creative cultural artefacts. This is such a shame, because it has encouraged generations of modern people to overlook and even disparage the wisdom of oral cultures.
Memories of the Bassian land bridge
People have been living on the land we now call Australia for at least 70,000 years. They were certainly here 20,000 years ago during the coldest time of the last great ice age, when the ocean surface around the Australian coast was about 125 metres lower and the Bassian land bridge connected (what is now) mainland Australia to Lutruwita/Tasmania.
People walked between these two landmasses, unaware that the area would be described as a ‘land bridge’ thousands of years later. To those people, it was just more land. Hundreds of lifetimes were spent on it, and then it started to shrink.
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About 16,000 years ago temperatures were rising across the Earth, melting land-based ice and causing the ocean surface to rise. The sea started to encroach on the low-lying Bassian land bridge, forcing people from its periphery towards its centre, from its lower parts to its higher parts. At some point, the Old People realised that the rising sea threatened the land bridge. So they made the decision to move north to Gippsland or south to Lutruwita/Tasmania, or perhaps to stay on one of the new islands. A final strand of the Bassian land bridge, at least five kilometres wide, remained until about 12,700 years ago. But the ocean continued to rise, submerging the last vestige of the land bridge around about 12,425 years ago. Thereafter Lutruwita/Tasmania was an island and there is no evidence that its people were in contact with those of the mainland for over 12,000 years, until after it was sighted by Abel Tasman in 1642.
First Nations’ Tasmanian (Palawa) traditions recorded in 1831 state that ‘… this Island was settled by emigrants from a far country, that they came here on land, [and] that the sea was subsequently formed’. Other Palawa stories recall when people ‘sat’ on icebergs around Lutruwita/Tasmania. The icebergs melted, causing the sea to rise and Lutruwita/Tasmania became an island to which those people then travelled by canoe.
So here we have examples of memories, in this case of rising seas flooding a former ‘land bridge’, that are more than 12,000 years old, passed down successively across perhaps 500 generations. Yet, the essence of the stories is retained. A remarkable human achievement.
The last walkable Bassian land bridge was submerged beneath the Bass Strait around 12,425 years ago. Map by Patrick Nunn. CC BY-ND-NC 4.0.
Are there other ancient memories like this?
Lardil stories tell of the 7,500-year-old ‘separation’ of islands in the Wellesley group from the mainland in the Gulf of Carpentaria. Image by NASA. CC BY-NC 2.0.
Dyirbul traditions tell of the formation of volcanic Lake Eacham in Queensland more than 9,000 years ago. Photograph by Konstantin Staschus. CC BY-ND-NC 2.0.
We consider such an achievement remarkable because we judge it by our standards, those of literate people. While unavoidable, this could be a mistake since knowledge transmission in oral societies is key to their survival. And the fact that we are here today is proof of survival, evidence that oral knowledges can be effectively communicated across hundreds of generations.
Elsewhere in Australia there are comparable examples of ancient memories being preserved for thousands of years. Some of the most compelling are those of coastal submergence, attributable to post-glacial sea-level rise. The Lardil stories tell of the 7,500-year-old ‘separation’ of islands in the Wellesley group from the mainland in the Gulf of Carpentaria. The Ngurunderi saga recalls the last dry-foot crossing, probably more than 10,000 years ago, of the land between Kangaroo Island and the Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia, which is now a 30-metre-deep strait known as Backstairs Passage. But there are also stories of volcanic eruptions in eastern Australia, including the Dyirbal traditions of the formation of Lake Eacham more than 9,000 years ago.
Recent research shows that in other parts of the world, especially those where (like Australia) there has been little cultural mixing for long periods of time, stories of similar antiquity exist. The Celtic fringe of northwest Europe has proven an especially fertile ground for stories which relate to ancient environmental realities, as well as parts of India and North America.
These stories, like those of the Palawa about sea level change in the Bass Strait region, remind us that humans have faced frightening environmental turning points before and learned how to endure, adapt and even thrive.
The knowledge contained in these stories of the deep past has relevance for us today as humanity grapples with a number of environmental challenges, often without realising that these have precedents in human history and, in some cases, are subjects of eyewitness accounts of how to survive.
So while we can rightly be awed by how old these stories are, we should not overlook the practical lessons they sometimes contain.
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Released under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial No Derivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license.
This story is subject to disclaimers, copyright restrictions, and cultural clearances. Copyright © Patrick Nunn, 2024.
Further reading
Hamacher, D., Nunn, P., Gantevoort, M., Taylor, R., Lehman, G., Law, K. H. A., Miles, M. 2023. The archaeology of orality: Dating Tasmanian Aboriginal oral traditions to the Late Pleistocene. Journal of Archaeological Science, Vol. 159, November. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305440323000997)
Kelly, L. 2016. The Memory Code: The Traditional Aboriginal Memory Technique that Unlocks the Secrets of Stonehenge, Easter Island and Ancient Monuments the World Over: Allen & Unwin.
Nunn, P.D. 2018. The Edge of Memory: Ancient Stories, Oral Tradition and the Post-Glacial World. London: Bloomsbury.
Nunn, P.D. 2019. Firepits of the Gods: ancient memories of maar volcanoes. The Conversation. June 4. (https://theconversation.com/firepits-of-the-gods-ancient-memories-of-maar-volcanoes-116808)
Nunn, P.D. 2021. Worlds in Shadow: Submerged Lands in Science, Memory and Myth. London: Bloomsbury.
Nunn, P.D. 2023. Memories within myth. Aeon. 6 April. (https://aeon.co/essays/the-stories-of-oral-societies-arent-myths-theyre-records)
