The Edge of Memory

by Patrick Nunn

  Writing therefore helps us to manage knowledge when its volume threatens to become too great for us to remember otherwise. When faced with a need to undertake complex tasks, the capacity of our memory often proves insufficient. In non-literate societies the amount of information at an individual’s disposal is likewise finite, so they are not generally able to undertake complex tasks (like brain surgery, satellite building or establishing zoos), which people inhabiting a literate world have come to do. Yet writing did not evolve because people yearned to undertake complex tasks – it probably came about incrementally, in the name of pragmatism, because it was needed to help societies of increasing complexity manage themselves. Writing helps when things need to be counted, checked, weighed, then communicated accurately to people beyond earshot. Fortuitously, writing was also found to have the power to allow one individual to become better informed than others from whom particular knowledge could be kept. It became a weapon that was often wielded by a small elite in order to repress a majority. The subsequent invention of printing presses marked the beginning of the end of this, and written knowledge of almost every kind is potentially at everyone’s fingertips today.

  The focus of this book is not on writing but on its predecessor – speech – and the way this was used to transmit knowledge from one generation to the next. In today’s literate societies, speech is generally reserved for relatively simple communication, whereas writing (and its scripted visual counterparts) is the method by which our most complex thinking is commonly shared. This situation underlines the point that speech alone is not generally able to adequately communicate all the complexities of the world as we know them today. Yet speech in non-literate societies may also not have been adequate to capture all of life’s complexities, which is why so many such societies evolved behaviours – perhaps like the bacchanalia of Sirente – that may have been difficult even for their contemporary practitioners to adequately explain. This is because speech was the principal means by which non-literate societies communicated between the older and the younger generations – passing on knowledge through the ages – so it had to be optimally configured for this purpose.

  Modern humans (Homo sapiens) first appeared on Earth about 200,000 years ago in tropical Africa.12 From there, as some of their hominid ancestors had done, our species dispersed to other parts of the world.13 Being smarter than these ancestral hominids, Homo sapiens asked questions their ancestors may not have thought to ask. How might we slaughter these animals many times our size? Can we eat this? How can we fashion tools to enable this? Instead of going around this large body of water to reach the other side, is there a way we can cross it? Groups of cooperating modern humans may have crossed the Red Sea 130,000 years ago, hopping from one island to another through the Farasan group to reach the coast of Asia. Arriving there, in what is probably the earliest example of human impact on natural resources, they gorged themselves on nearshore seafoods, even eating one particular shallow-water clam species almost to extinction.14

  We can envisage situations where rudimentary speech evolved among these groups of humans to enable the crossing of small water gaps and the exploitation of unfamiliar food sources, but it was later, perhaps 60,000–70,000 years ago, that language became requisite. By then, Homo sapiens had followed the coast of southern Asia15 into what are now the island coasts of Indonesia – places like the south coast of Borneo and the north coast of Java – that were at that time, when the sea level was 80m (260ft) lower than it is today, contiguous with the rest of dry-land Asia. People found themselves in a situation where they wished to cross the ocean to reach the land they were convinced existed over the horizon.16 To achieve this they needed watercraft, and irrespective of whether these were simple bamboo rafts lashed together with vines or something altogether more sophisticated, it was not possible for one person to do everything alone. Cooperation was needed, direction was required, so effective communication using language is regarded as having been essential by this stage in modern human evolution.17

  As discussed in more detail in Chapter 4, the level of the ocean surface (sea level) changed by 100m (328ft) or more every 100,000 years or so within the past few million years. These great swings of sea level repeatedly altered the coastal geographies of most places, but would have been most noticeable in regions of what are now islands – like South-east Asia – yet were once contiguous continental land masses. Those ancestors of ours, naked with sun-browned skins,18 who reached the south-east corner of the Asian continent some 70,000 years ago when the sea level was 60m (200ft) lower than it is today, found that there was no more dry land by which they might extend their range southeastwards. They had reached the edge of a deep-water passage marking the Wallace Line, the name given by zoogeographers to the faunal boundary between the Asian and Australian continents, which no land mammals before humans had been able to cross.19

  The cross-ocean journeys that took place 60,000–70,000 years ago in island South-east Asia involved the successful traversing of distances as great as 70km (43 miles), and resulted in the first human arrivals in Australia perhaps 65,000 years ago.20 The successful and sustained colonisation of Australia at this time was almost certainly aided by the ability of the first Australians to communicate through speech. Life in Australia was hard, ultimately proving more challenging than it may have been along the tropical coasts of Asia. Not only was much of Australia uncommonly dry, but it was also inhabited by animals and plants with which the colonists were unfamiliar. It is likely that language became key to adaptation and survival. Knowledge about water sources, and about where to find food, and how to capture and consume it, probably all became part of a lore that was intentionally passed on from one generation to the next to ensure a tribe’s survival. This is certainly what ethnographic information from Australian Aboriginal groups collected tens of thousands of years later suggests.21

  Elsewhere in the world, the evolution of language also became key to the ability of Homo sapiens to survive in environments outside those in which it had originated. Clothing provides a good example of this ability. In many tropical climates, clothing to protect our bodies from the weather is not necessary to survival – we can be naked – but the movement of modern humans into cooler, higher-latitude environments required us to find ways of enduring their colder, even freezing, conditions. Our ancestors therefore began using animal skins, learning how to treat them so that they would last longer. Several human groups experimented with clothing made from tree bark, a process that fortuitously led to the invention of paper – the essential partner of language on the journey to literacy – in several Asian and European cultures. All these comparatively complex processes required cooperation between humans that could only – it is thought – have come about after language of sufficient complexity had evolved.22

  Plant domestication – essential for feeding high-density populations – also required people to communicate through language. Which plants were suited to human consumption, how they might be cultivated, nurtured, harvested and prepared, were all questions that required the use of memory and communal knowledge sharing, underpinned by sufficient language abilities. In this way, language facilitated the rapid evolution of human societies that occurred in several parts of the world within the past few millennia. The transformation was from lifestyles based on hunting and gathering, which often required people to be nomadic, through the cultivation of crops and domestication of animals that allowed sedentary self-sufficient communities to be established, to the development of urban centres that housed hierarchical societies in which most residents were not directly involved in food production. They became the first consumers to be removed from the front line of production: the earliest merchants, food processors like bakers and butchers, and of course the priests and the soldiers responsible for others’ welfare.

  The earliest urban centres in the world were in those places – often close to fertile, well-watered river floodplains – where large numbers of people could be fed from cul
tivated crops and domesticated animals. There were some such places in southern China, where rice agriculture began perhaps 7,000 years ago in the lower valleys of the rivers Huanghe and Yangtze.23 Others developed in Mesopotamia and depended on a range of agro-pastoral activities, such as dry-farmed wheat, barley and lentils supplemented by sheep and goat husbandry.24 Complex, comparatively densely populated societies of this kind involved organisation and required management to endure, both of which in turn necessitated language of appropriate complexity. It is no coincidence that writing evolved more rapidly in such societies than those elsewhere.

  In other parts of the world – in Australia, parts of Africa and the Americas, for example – opportunities for plant and animal domestication were fewer and the pressure for this less exigent, so people continued to feed themselves largely through hunting and gathering. Language in such situations may have developed as the need arose for new words and concepts; it therefore became different in both vocabulary size and descriptive focus from the way that language evolved in cities. What is of considerable interest to this book are the cultural dimensions of language evolution – the development of words and concepts that describe worlds of the mind.25 The links between imagination and myth, especially as they relate to human memories of calamitous events, are of especial interest.

  In March 1847, Mt St Helens – one of the volcanoes in the Cascade Range in the north-west USA – erupted spectacularly. A painting of the event is shown in the colour plate section and not much imagination is needed to see the eruption cloud as a giant, long-winged bald eagle, a creature with which local people were familiar. The head and beak of the eagle appear orange-red, the cloud of steam rising from the volcano’s crater (perhaps fortuitously backlit by the moon); the body and feathers of the giant bird are darker yet clearly discernible. The eagle’s beak appears fastened to the mountain, as though tearing at living flesh, rivulets of blood running from a creature tethered there, its roars of pain heard by all. For non-literate observers accustomed to animistic interpretations of such phenomena, an aggressive eagle analogy was obvious.

  In other parts of the world where active volcanoes are found, there are also myths about giant eagles attacking people confined on mountaintops. A well-known example is that of Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods in Greek mythology. Prometheus introduced fire to the human race, something for which he was punished by Zeus, who had him chained to a mountain in the Caucasus where a large eagle pecked daily at his liver (his immortality caused this organ to regenerate each night) something that was accompanied by loud noises and earth tremors (the screams and thrashing of the hapless Prometheus). It is understandable that the story of Prometheus has been interpreted as that of an eruption. There are similar mythical interpretations of eruptions from active volcanoes in many other parts of the world.26 In some instances these myths have even pointed scientists towards unsuspected activity within human memory of ancient volcanoes, previously assumed to be long dead.27

  Another example from the Pacific makes the link between memorable geological events and human mythmaking even more explicit. Compared to the continents, the ocean-floor crust is comparatively young. You can see this when you look at the global distribution of the indicators of geological youthfulness – like repeated earthquakes and volcanic eruptions – which are clustered in and around ocean basins, especially the Pacific. All oceanic islands began life as ocean-floor volcanoes, labouring to survive and grow despite the pressure of often several kilometres of overlying ocean water. Many failed, of course, yet others succeeded not only in building themselves up to the ocean surface, but also in growing above it, thereby forming some of the spectacularly active volcanic islands found today in the world’s oceans.28 In some places in the Pacific, the summits of active volcanoes lurk just a few tens of metres beneath the water’s surface. When these volcanoes periodically erupt, the forced mixing of cold ocean water and liquid rock (heated to perhaps 1,000°C/1,800°F) makes for memorable (phreatomagmatic) explosive eruptions.

  Sometimes the clouds of steam and ash from these volcanoes produce intriguing shapes (see colour plate section). Occasionally such eruptions produce islands that may survive anything from days to years before succumbing to the unceasing wave attack. This combination of circumstances is thought to underlie the stories that exist in most Pacific Island cultures about the demi-god Maui, who sailed from place to place with a giant fishhook that he used to pull fish-shaped islands up from the sea floor to the surface. Many descriptions of this process emphasise the ‘island-as-fish’ detail (see colour plate section). The thrashing of the fish as it was being hauled from the water agitated and discoloured the ocean surface, just as happens during such shallow-water volcanic eruptions. Research into the geographical distribution of the Maui legends in the Pacific has allowed insights into such eruptions in the time before written records began.29

  The purpose of relating these stories is to illustrate how the evolution of human imagination may have been stimulated by witnessing dramatic natural events (like volcanic eruptions, giant waves and abrupt land displacement), which were felt to demand rationalisation because of their implausible nature and their apparent unprecedentedness. It is the same for us today. Confronted by phenomena with which we may be unfamiliar or for which we feel official explanations are inadequate, there is scope for us to use our imagination. The idea of ‘aliens among us’ may be considered an extreme example of such phenomena, but it sits on the same imaginative spectrum as some of our explanations for more pedestrian occurrences, such as unexpected traffic hold-ups or commodity shortages. The point here is that every culture on Earth, past and present, uses imagination to supply explanation where none is readily forthcoming from trusted sources.

  Literate people – those who can read and write – are often dismissive, even it should be said sometimes contemptuous, of people and societies that are non-literate. In this sense, literacy is tyrannical, for it encourages us to undervalue our pasts – the knowledge amassed by those countless ancestors of ours who could neither read nor write. Literacy spawns arrogance. We might ask ourselves: if there is just so much information ‘out there’ on the internet and in libraries, and we have no hope of absorbing it all, what value can there be in investing time in trying to understand knowledge that has never been written down? However, what we typically forget in all this is that most of the world of information in which we find ourselves wallowing today was, until comparatively recently in human history, known only through speech. It was information encoded and processed and communicated orally.30 And, of the tiny proportion that has been written down, most has commonly been dismissed as unimportant – primitive, romantic, at best symbolic or metaphorical, certainly not real history. Many scientists are now starting to feel differently, especially about those types of myth, named euhemeristic, that appear likely to be recollections by preliterate peoples of memorable events, those that future generations should know about.

  The place appears dry and barren. We might consider it endlessly so. But to the people squatting in the shade of the trees adjoining the small pool of water, the landscape is neither harsh nor welcoming. Rather it is adequate, sufficiently replete with opportunities for subsistence. For the people and their ancestors have survived in such places for hundreds if not thousands of years, but the knowledge of how to do so was not acquired afresh by each new generation. It built on knowledge passed on from the old to the young, and enabled the people to face every new day more confident than they might otherwise have been that they would be able to sustain themselves and their kin from the land to which they were bound. The stories were related in the evenings, as the people bathed in the glow from the embers of the cooking fires. The first stories were always about their history, revolving around whence the ancestors had come, and who among that number was particularly esteemed and why. The stories of history ran into those of geography. They were stories about why this place is dry and whether it had always been thus; about the adjoin
ing lands where contrasting conditions prevail; about the animals that inhabit the land and how they might be captured and their flesh consumed; about where people might find water to drink; about places to avoid.

  It could be argued that the purpose of oral communication between generations in such contexts was principally pragmatic – passing on the wisdom of the ancestors to younger people so that they might survive to one day pass on this knowledge to their children. Knowledge was key to survival; survival is the most basic of instincts for living things. With each new generation, new knowledge would be added, resulting – after a thousand years or more – in a formidable body of traditional wisdom. Research suggests that it was grandparents who became key in passing on this wisdom to their grandchildren, removing the obligation from parents who generally had other, more time-demanding roles in such groups.31

  To engage young people and to encourage them to value and remember this information, it was often embellished – dressed up in arresting clothing. Exaggeration and mythmaking were common, especially in detailing the exploits of distant ancestors – people were giants who strode across the land, shaping it, taming it and making it fit for others to occupy. The reinforcement of group identity was also important for ensuring the cohesiveness of the group. This is something that was often achieved through traditional practices – the group’s unique ways of doing things. These ranged from spiritual beliefs and worship protocols to more mundane things like food preparation and even forms of greeting. Finally, the medium of communication of knowledge transfer from old to young was commonly designed to maximise the listeners’ attentiveness, ensuring that they would remember the message the next day … and long thereafter.