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There are a few examples of oral cultures ensuring perfect transmission across a large expanse of time.
One example is the several different recitation styles used to memorize Sanskrit verses. These methods give memorizers multiple ways to remember a line, and also prevent errors like the inadvertent mixing of adjacent words (" euphonic combination"). The "checksumming schemes" are far more elaborate than you'd imagine. [1] The result is perfect transmission of text and its pronunciation, including pitch accent.
Another example is a "multi-party verification" scheme in some Aboriginal Australian cultures. "... storytelling among contemporary Aboriginal people can involve the deliberate tracking of teaching responsibilities. For example, a man teaches the stories of his country to his children. His son has his knowledge of those stories judged by his sister’s children—for certain kin are explicitly tasked with ensuring that those stories are learned and recounted properly—and people take those responsibilities seriously. ... the 'owner-manager' relationship, requiring a story to be discussed explicitly across three generations of a patriline, constitutes a cross-generational mechanism which may be particularly successful at maximising precision in replication of a story across successive generations". [2]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vedic_chant
[2]: "Aboriginal Memories of Inundation of the Australian Coast Dating from More than 7000 Years Ago", Patrick D. Nunn, https://doi.org/10.1080/00049182.2015.1077539
I think the harsh conditions in Australia, where there a thousand ways to die, put the onus on truth and preservation of it in the oral tradition. Unlike most other cultures where it's kind of ok to gradually deviate from the truth. It is worth paying attention to the aborigine stories.They have also made astronomical observations that are pretty accurate to the date. https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/australias-indigenous-peopl...
Singing/Ballads are also popular way of preserving information fidelity. Homer's works were based on ballads. We don't put premium on memory now, but before the invention of printing press, memory techniques were widely studied and used.
I've also heard it about the Buddhist tradition, that at least three groups of monks would memorize parts of the canon, and they would preiodically come together to chant it. If one group differed from the other two, they would know that's an error (at least to fairly high probability). This seems to have been an accurate method of transmission since independently written-down versions separated by centuries of oral tradition in Gandhara and Sri Lanka are very similar.
In India, there is a custom of passing ancient knowledge through poetic verses. Every poetic verses is sung in a specific 'meter'. If there is a discrepancy in recitation then remembering and passing knowledge 'letter by letter' can not succeed.
Many of the verses are thousands of years old.
I read some describing an ancient extinct river ~7000 years ago, later rediscovered through satellite imagery (don't know the right term).
That’s clever and all, but how can you actually be sure the message was completely unchanged over 7000 years without an original written record? I get that special recitation tricks can make it harder to mess up, but I don’t think you can definitively say the information never once changed.
That's an interesting way to do a checksum
An example of this may be the healing spells found in the Merseburg charms, which probably came from a common Indo-European origin somewhere in the Eurasian steppes.
The river is the Sarasvati.
Isn't that how ancient Greek texts (that are attributed to mythical Homer) have been passed down too?
Yeah, in language that suits HN, formal poetic structure amounts to error correction in oral tradition.
It dramatically narrows the possibilities of what idea or word or sound or whatever could fit in any particular place in the verse, making it easier to memorize and accurately recite. Clever (and some blundering) poets and changes in language still set up these recitations to evolve away from whatever they originally were, but the original seeds linger a long, long time.
One correction guys, river had started drying around 4000 years ago and took 500-1000 years to dry completely.
The Saraswati description in the RgVeda is not 7000 years old. The text itself is believed to be only around 3500 years old
It occurred to me recently that tig/tag has probably been passed down through oral tradition from child to child for millennia. It's possible that it's older than homo-sapiens, older than the taming of fire. Millions of years of tradition.
And it still being passed on orally, child-to-child.
Not quite as old but another example of an enduring child-to-child cultural transmission is the daring right of passage that is Chappy/Knicky-Knocky Nine Doors/Ding dong ditch[0].
What is tig/tag?
Fascinating.
Growing up in a Hindu household, a lot of our festivals involve listening to origin stories of the customs. A lot of those have of course been glorified to add an element of holiness, but it's possible they are actually derived from some small incident happened in the past.
Like a butterfly effect, a small insignificant event leading to a major celebration for billion people continued over centuries
I think you just found out the roots of every religion.
> "Australia kept the memory of its first peoples alive thanks to a powerful oral tradition that enabled it to be passed on," Delannoy said.
> "However in our societies, memory has changed since we switched to the written word, and we have lost this sense."
I sort of think that this is a "what's water?" thing, because a lot of our ancient prehistorical traditions and practices that continued into the historical era and beyond are so embedded with how we see how ourselves and act and behave that it's impossible for us to even notice them. There's a lot that we have looked at in ancient sites and have just known what the purpose was for because we still do the same thing now, or at least we had recorded uses for it from historical texts, it's just said to be "obvious" and not really worth commenting about how interesting it is that we preserved these oral traditions.
There's a kind of exoticism/noble savage thing going on here, I think.
Yeah. I can think of one ritual that's probably even older: burying the dead.
However what interesting about this tradition is the degree of specificity that was preserved with this ritual (e.g. stick of same type of wood, coated with fat, put in a small fire to break), none of which has any real practical purpose.
Its impossible to tell, but the sense of passage of time must have been dramatically different in earlier periods of human development.
Persistent rituals passed on from elders to youngsters, oral transmission of huge poems and other such "low tech" information tools must have given some structure to what otherwise might have felt as an eternal reboot.
I read somewhere (don't recall exactly where) that your sense of the passage of time is directly related to how much things change because that impacts how many memories you form. Essentially, when every day is the same, not many new memories are created, so you don't notice time passing (New Years was just a few weeks ago, how can it be July already!), but when things are constantly changing, time passes much more slowly. When you're a child and non-stop learning and exploring, 3 months seems like an eternity.
I wonder if technology development has a similar effect. When the world essentially remains unchanged for your entire life, things must seem much faster with days blending together.
Herzog talks about this a bit in his cave-painting movie[0]. It's fascinating to think that for thousands of years, our ancestors lived without any significant change to their world. I like to imagine that they were pretty happy with that (subject to the normal animal stresses of survival) -- but as you say, it's impossible to tell.
The persistency that you're describing is key. I'd like to think that previous generations were far more content with time and what is associated with it. The mundane of the day-by-day, aging, death, etc.
Very cool :-). I don't know that much about the natives of Australia and their history, I wonder how many of these oral traditions have been written down. An immediate google gave me this document, seems interesting at a glance: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/159354575.pdf
When I lived on the west coast a native friend of mine spoke of how some elders no longer wanted stories to be written down. They have seen how their oral stories get documented, effectively transforming them from a living secret into a fixed text in a dead book. The book then goes on a shelf, fodder for the endless stream of anthropology classes taught ay universities in distant cities. More people read the story in the book than ever come to listen to the story in person.
After a few decades of this pattern, young anthologists are now hearing stories and asking questions about why the story today is possibly slightly different than what was written down a decade prior. There is an old stereotype of western Indians believing that cameras could capture one's soul. That is something to think about when we "document" an oral tradition.
I’m surprised by how tenuous the link is between the cave find and the archival find. Is the bar really that low for claims in archaeological papers or am I missing something? It’s a compelling story, but surely Occam’s razor would conclude that poking sticks into dead animals and fire pits is just what people have done for thousands of years? Where’s the evidence that there was chanting and a healing ceremony?
Edit: full paper is freely available on Nature here:
"Each one was found in a separate fireplace around the size of the palm of a hand—far too small to have been used for heat or cooking meat.
The slightly charred ends of the sticks had been cut specially to stick into the fire, and both were coated in human or animal fat."
That's rather more than circumstantial evidence. Granted the ritual might have changed a bit over 12,000 odd years but where else have you seen people poke sticks into tiny hearth's?
Have to agree here. Also just kind of doesn't pass the common sense test. We all learn the "game of telephone" as a kid and how information can change even just being passed once.
In fact I've heard archaeologists in the past specifically say that no oral tradition can survive intact more than 100 years. Usually this statement is in reference to certain creation myths being relatively modern inventions.
A claim of 12000 years needs strong evidence. Given what I've seen from the field lately I have a counter-theory, but I'm not really comfortable sharing.
In Indonesia there are 35k+ year old cave "paintings" of hand imprints, and apparently it is still a custom for some in the area to put their hand imprint on their house. It's probably in the same area where just today they announced finding the oldest cave painting: https://www.reuters.com/science/worlds-oldest-cave-painting-....
this ritual likely had a real effect on the person (similar to placebo effect). They probably wouldn't have kept it up for 12k years if they weren't getting some tangible improvement.
Its always awesome to read about finding early human tools and techniques. But, could the sticks have been 12,000 years old, but the event far less?
Lots of people asking how they had human fat... you poke someone's wound with a hot stick, there is probably fat on it after. So they may have been using cauterization.
They may also have been cooking small animals while trying to avoid the light, smell, and smoke plume a larger fire creates. Which would attract predators.
> One stick was 11,000 years old and the other 12,000 years old, radiocarbon dating found.
so there were two sticks, at the same site/ritual, but one stick was a 1000 years older than the other?
does that mean the ancestors of the present day people were coming to this location for the ritual for a 1000 years? but then for some reason stopped?
This is so fascinating!
Slightly off-topic, but I recently learned that the Aboriginals may have had contact with Tamil people from South India.
Another article on the same topic:
https://cosmosmagazine.com/history/archaeology/indigenous-au...
Kinda sad that the ritual was a way to curse somebody. 12,000 years of hurting each other.
Side Node: computer programing is kinda cool. It is a set of incantations which actually does work.
EDIT: Hello, all you down-voters and people who say I should read the article before commenting :-) I to, don't like it when people just start commenting without reading the article.
I also don't like it when people take what a pop-sci writer too seriously. In this case, I was interested enough to read the original article in Nature, where it says this practice was for cursing (see quote at the end)
Don't forget Gell-Man's Amnesia :-)
"Howitt described how magic was employed to harm a victim using a ritual fire and a wooden object smeared or attached with a piece of human or animal fat (major sources of lipids): “In all these tribes a general, I may say almost an universal, prac- tice has been to procure some article belonging to the intended victim. A piece of his hair, some of his faeces, a bone picked by him and dropped, a shred of his opossum rug, or at the present time of his clothes, will suffice, or if nothing else can be got he may be watched until he is seen to spit, when his saliva is carefully picked up with a piece of wood and made use of for his destruction..."
It's not the first time that I read hypothesis of Aboriginal oral traditions that stayed for much longer than anywhere else in the world. I wonder why it would be the case there and not elsewhere
> slightly charred ends of the sticks had been cut specially to stick into the fire, and both were coated in human or animal fat.
Wait, what? Where did they get human fat from…?
Had those people lived by our enlightened standards, it would never have come to that. Replication of ritual would have drawn lawsuits for copyright infringement and brand dilution. No wonder they never became filthy rich.
One thing that caught my eye was "both were coated in human or animal fat" and "throwing stick smeared in human or kangaroo fat".
I mean the "human fat" part, that seemed strange.
Getting human fat non-lethally is probably impossible using technology from 12000 years ago. If the fat was obtained from a human corpse, it would rule out at least burying the body. But still, wouldn't obtaining the fat from a non-buried corpse disturb the deceased on some religious-spiritual level?
Or was it common to mutilate dead enemies or something like that?
Edit: Oh, OK, I saw others asking the same question and replies which shed light on this.
Imagine a smartphone lasting even 12 years
Hopefully Rio Tinto don’t blow it up:
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/may/26/rio-t...
I'm from a Jewish family that has been unable to pass down its rituals over the past few generations. My great-grandparents were observant on both sides. I have no religion or inherited rituals to speak of.
So how does a ritual get successfully passed down for something like 500 generations? What must the observer get from it that motivated them so strongly to pass it along with the necessary vigor? Was it something in the ritual itself, perhaps an altered state drug experience? Or was the motivation just cultural?
Is there anything in our culture that could possibly have such staying power, or is our cultural temperature so high that nothing can survive for long?
Interplanetary Generation Ships might have a chance?
When you understand it you call it "science" or "technology". When you don't understand it you call it "religion" or "ritual".
These are smart people. Just like us. Time is money for them just like it is for us. They probably had a very good, practical reason to do this "ritual". As surely as tapping keyboards.