The Edge of Memory

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The Edge of Memory Page 3

by Patrick Nunn


  From numerous observations of traditional storytelling of this kind in many cultures across the world, we know much about how messaging was enhanced through performance. Traditional storytellers rarely sit still. Often they stand, mimicking the actions of the characters whose exploits they are relating. Sometimes they dance or clown, making their audience laugh and encouraging its attention to the narrative. Sometimes they masquerade, wearing masks or dressing in ways that caricature those they are describing. Sometimes the power of the narrative alone is enough to captivate the listeners, in the same way as many of us today can be captivated by a gripping film or novel. For as most successful storytellers know, whether they be novelists or screenwriters, as a species we seem to have evolved a weakness for narrative. Yet what we often today label escapism may well have developed in our species from simple pragmatism. Our modern predilection for narrative may derive from our attention to survival stories.

  This is not everyone’s view, of course. Many people believe that every person has a ‘creative streak’, implanted eons ago within our genetic make-up, which explains our cumulative achievements in art and music, for example. It may also explain why we are curious and innovative, why we have ‘advanced’ so much compared with other species less fortuitously endowed. I have a less conjectural view. It seems to me that tens of thousands of years ago, our ancestors were never arbitrarily creative. Everything they did was purposeful because they had to spend so long acquiring the food they and their dependents needed to survive. Thus early art – cave paintings, for instance – was designed to supplement memory in order to render more effective the understanding of history and geography by each successive generation.32 As that purpose inevitably declined in urbanising societies, so such forms of art took on a life of their own, culminating in artworks that even lack obvious meaning, at least to the untutored eye. In a parallel way, storytelling evolved in non-literate cultures to pass on practical information, but in order to convince every new generation of its importance (and ensure that it passed it on to its children), it was made more memorable through exaggeration, identity reinforcement and exciting methods of communication. The pragmatic roots of such storytelling have been lost in most of today’s literate cultures, so it is only the other things that remain: narrative, drama and performance for their own sake.

  Ten thousand years ago, all those cultures on Earth that had been established for some millennia had knowledge bases that relied almost entirely on oral communication. It is likely that some of this was formalised – a body of lore that all adolescents needed to know before they could be regarded as adult – and some less so. There are likely to have been many cultural practices governing the teaching of tribal lore, usually gender specific and ranging from the simple requirement that initiates repeat key texts from memory to ones involving practical tests of understanding. The latter may have included requiring initiates to spend extended periods of time alone away from their tribe, surviving on wild foods and communing with the spirits of the ancestors, thereby validating their claim to adulthood.

  The San peoples of southern Africa comprise a cultural group likely to have existed for 50,000 years or more.33 Responsible for much of the region’s rock art, the San also have formidable oral bodies of traditional lore and practise various forms of initiation, which for boys represent their future roles as hunters and food providers, and for girls focus on childbearing. Storytellers are lauded among the San people and routinely employ exaggeration and mythologisation to captivate their audiences; in one such tale, aggressors are transformed to ‘black ants’ swarming through the camps of the Early People, eating all they encounter. Yet many San stories involve imparting practical knowledge – they range from stories articulating the subsistence possibilities of various places, to more routine tales describing ‘sightings of water sources, plants ripening, stands of fruit and nut trees, animals, tracks’.34 Performance by storytellers is common and occasionally intensifies to frenzied trances. Much San rock art has been interpreted as images of performed storytelling and may indeed have been created by the performers, perhaps shamanic, who used painting to remind their people about a particular performance and its purpose.

  Rock art elsewhere has inevitably been interpreted less circumspectly. Many of California’s surviving petroglyphs and pictographs are seen as an astonishing ‘record of prehistoric earthquake and volcanic activity’,35 intended to inform future generations about the hazards that lie within the apparently benign landscapes of the state. Yet if such stories, including those about Crater Lake described earlier, created the larger framework for Native American youngsters to understand the history of the place in which they dwelt, more practical everyday advice was also provided orally in ritual contexts. In North America, the nature of these varied depending on the way of life followed by particular tribes.

  The Tlingit people of south-east Alaska have a set of traditions (tamánwit) that explain the nature of appropriate Tlingit behaviour, especially in relation to the sustainable use of the wild foods on which the people were once entirely dependent. The Huna Tlingit had a gull-egg collection practice that is adjudged as having required ‘a sophisticated appreciation of … gull nesting biology and behaviour’.36 Through oral instruction, the Tlingit were taught to remove gull eggs from nests containing just one or two eggs, no more. The science that validates this practice is that a female gull aims to lay three eggs each season, so if one is taken when there are just two laid, she will lay another two to reach that number – a total of four. If two are stolen from a nest with two, she will lay another three – a total of five. But if a nest is found with three eggs in it, the chances are that the mother gull has finished laying and could not lay more eggs even if she so desired. This collection strategy optimises the chances of each female laying three eggs while supplying extra to the Tlingit collectors, something that is designed ‘to conserve local gull populations while affording a substantial and predictable harvest’.37 We can infer that similar instances of sustainable harvesting of wild foods underpinned Native American use of other resources in ancient times. For example, it has been shown that at least 700 years of fur-seal hunting on the Washington coast (north-west USA) had no impact on seal populations, plausibly because of (now-lost) oral traditions governing people’s sustainable harvesting.38

  These examples are intended to emphasise the point that non-literate cultures utilised oral traditions for a number of practical purposes, ranging from the sustainable use of particular resources to wider instruction in lore for survival. Many oral traditions also focus on history, begging the question as to why societies primarily concerned with surviving needed to know about this, apparently irrelevant, topic. Perhaps it was for the same reasons as we today learn history. It counters the forces of globalisation and cultural homogenisation by giving us a unique identity. It celebrates the unique journeys that we and our ancestors undertook to reach the place we are in now, even though that place is shared by other people whose ancestors reached it along different routes. Ultimately, history can transport each of us to a purer, quieter place where, as Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, there are voices that ‘speaketh clear’ to us.39

  The oldest known rocks on the planet we inhabit formed almost 4,500 million years ago; life appeared at least 3,500 million years ago; human ancestors (hominids) almost five million years ago and our species, Homo sapiens, around 200,000 years ago. We began wearing long trousers about 3,000 years ago.40 History is a subjective business – you must choose your range, for nobody can hope to synthesise it in its entirety.

  You also need to be clear about your information sources. Most historians define ‘history’ as observed history, validated by having been written down shortly after the events recounted took place. Then there is a time dominated by oral communication between generations, a process that some will tell you is fraught with dangers around obscuring and omission of accurate detail, which is why it is sometimes tendentiously labelled ‘prehistory’. There is then
an even earlier history, extending backwards through a time when humans existed but from which no human memories of things that happened have been preserved, a time that can be interrogated only by science. Tentatively we might call this ‘inferred human history’, because science cannot reconstruct human thoughts, so what we imagine might have happened and why may actually be completely wrong. Then with more éclat, we drift into ‘geological history’ – most of our planet’s history – where hard impersonal data acquired through often centuries of deductive enquiry have allowed us to build convincing impersonal models of how things once were and how they became what they are today. Much of this type of history is inescapably vague because the time periods we are dealing with are so long. How do we process what might have happened in a million years? We cannot do so readily and the temptation to conflate time – to treat a million years as a thousand or even a hundred – is something that often proves difficult to resist.

  The main focus of this book is a slice of the grey area within prehistory and inferred human history, a time from the coldest part of the last great ice age, about 20,000 years ago, to 1,000 years or so ago, when at least a few societies in almost every part of the world had acquired some degree of literacy. This grey area was dominated by history communicated orally and involved human societies in every part of the inhabited world. So how accurate is oral history compared to the other types?

  Most people to have written on this subject, historians and anthropologists in particular, have been quite rude about oral histories, focusing on their manifest limitations rather than on their potential as ways of helping unravel the history of the distant past. To be generous, the reasons for such rudeness are easy to understand. They include the tyranny of literacy (mentioned earlier) – the idea that the written word, by virtue of rendering information essentially static over long time periods, appears naturally superior to the dynamic stories told by non-literate people. Another reason is the belief that human memory simply does not have the capacity to retain sizeable bodies of knowledge without aides mémoires like books and computer monitors, or even notepads. What is this belief based on? It is based on the way we are today, not the way our ancestors were a millennium or more ago. On the face of it, it still seems reasonable – after all, who of us can store more than a few telephone numbers in our heads? But if we had no choice, if we needed the information in order to survive, perhaps we might acquire the ability to carry even a small telephone directory around in our minds.

  The point here is that 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. We see such bias in hundreds of instances, which have led to an orthodoxy that memories communicated only orally mostly endure 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.

  The main purpose of this book is to demonstrate that there are oral histories about rising sea levels from Aboriginal Australia, and plausibly cultures in many other parts of the world, which have endured several thousand years – more than 7,000 years in the Australian case – and that they should therefore compel us to shrug off our time-hardened scepticism about how long such traditions might endure, and look with a less critical eye at some of the others that remain extant. The implications of doing so are immense, for not only does it restore some credibility to the reputation of methods of oral communication in non-literate cultures, but it also hints at hitherto unsuspected depths of the memories of our own species.

  Chapter 2 explains the societal context of Australian Aboriginal storytelling – how a people’s beliefs and history shaped their reality in ways that contrasted sharply (and painfully) with those of the British when they began to settle Australia in 1788. Chapter 3 describes the 21 known groups of stories about coastal drowning along the Australian fringe, and the details of the process they describe and its often memorable life-changing consequences.

  The way in which the ocean surface has changed – by a rise of more than 120m (400ft) – since the coldest time of the last ice age is described in the first part of Chapter 4. The use of this knowledge to determine minimum ages for Aboriginal Australian drowning stories is explained towards the end of the chapter.

  Shifting the focus away from Australia, Chapter 5 examines the nature of comparable drowning stories from other parts of the world, particularly in north-west Europe and along the fringes of the Indian subcontinent. Ancient stories other than those describing coastal submergence are outlined from different parts of the world in Chapter 6 – stories describing meteorite falls (like that in the Italian Sirente discussed earlier), volcanic eruptions, abrupt land movements and even the nature of animals that became extinct long ago.

  The final chapter asks whether we have underestimated ourselves by denying for so long that oral traditions may preserve knowledge across a sweep of human history far grander than we suspected, and suggests where the new frontiers of knowledge in this field might lie.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Words that Matter in a Harsh Land

  Not everyone everywhere knows as much about Australia as do Australians, although a dispassionate observer of world geography might rightly wonder why. For Australia is massive – pretty much the same size as Europe or the conterminous United States (Figure 2.1).

  Figure 2.1 The size of mainland Australia compared to the sizes of the conterminous United States (left) and Europe (right).

  About one-third of the continent of Australia is real desert. Most of the rest is also quite dry, making Australia, after Antarctica, the world’s driest continent. For humans bent on settling Australia, its arid heart in particular has long proved a challenge, yet the first arrivals not only traversed it repeatedly but also occupied it, establishing desert cultures that flourished for tens of thousands of years. We know little of these first people’s journeys of exploration, their successes and failures,1 but there is a far more complete record of European exploration of Australia’s forbidding interior that allows a taste of such encounters.

  Consider one of the first such explorers, Charles Sturt, who – buoyed by rumours (unfounded) of an inland sea – travelled across south-east Australia in 1828–1830, reporting on the Murray and Darling river systems that dominate its drainage. Sturt barely had a good word to say about anything, it seems, finding little water (much of what he found was too salty to quench the thirst),2 and the plains ‘dreary’, barren and seemingly limitless. Sturt’s apologetic judgement of Australia’s interior was that ‘there is no life upon its surface, if I may so express myself; but the stillness of death reigns in its brushes, and over its plains’.3 Yet his belief in an inland sea lingered and he led another expedition into Australia’s dry heart in 1844–1845, reaching its geographical centre in the Simpson Desert. But there was no trace of the inland sea and, battling scurvy, he headed home.

  In part, Australia owes its conspicuous dryness to its topography – it is the world’s lowest continent, with barely any land more than 1,000m (3,280ft) above sea level – which in turn is explainable by its geological history (see colour plate section). Currently the best model to explain the evolution of the Earth’s surface is one – called plate tectonics – that pictures the entire Earth’s crust as broken into a jigsaw of rigid interlocking pieces named plates, each of which is moving relative to the others. Along plate boundaries, adjoining plates may converge (often forming mountain ranges, causing volcanic and earthquake activity) or diverge (generally associated with rifting and volcanism). Sometimes two plates simply slide past one another, sticking, then periodically slipping and causing earthquakes.

  Uniquely among the world’s continents, Australia lies wholly within the middle of a crustal plate, far from the main sites of geological activity where plates are created or dest
royed in paroxysms of seismic and volcanic fury. And, because Australia has been so located for around 34 million years, there has been ample time for denudation to work on removing its surface irregularities, unchallenged in almost every part by the mountain-building processes that have created young topography on other continents. Yet it would be wrong to imagine that distance from plate boundaries renders the Australian continent wholly immune to geological disturbances. The continent is criss-crossed by faults along which stress from movements at distant plate boundaries may occasionally shimmy. The real wake-up call in this regard was the Newcastle Earthquake on 28 December 1989, a magnitude 5.6 event in a place long regarded as seismically inactive that prompted a new and improved awareness of earthquake risk across the continent.

  While most geological activity on Earth is concentrated along plate boundaries, there are places in the middle of plates where magma reaches the Earth’s surface from within. Named hotspots, these places are commonly sites of active volcanoes and – most importantly – are usually stationary over long periods of time. This means that when a plate moves across a fixed hotspot, you get a succession of volcanoes being built: the youngest one sits over the hotspot, while the progressively older extinct ones trace the line of ancient plate movement. The best-studied example of such a hotspot chain is the Hawaiian Islands, in which two active volcanoes (Mauna Loa on Hawai’i Island and underwater Lo’ihi) lie above the hotspot; then, stretching away to the north-west for some 5,800km (3,600 miles), is a line of ancient volcanoes, each progressively older, which mark the passage of the Pacific Plate over this hotspot for an incredible 65 million years.

  There are also hotspot chains in eastern Australia, formed when the plate of which the Australian continent is part moved over a series of fixed hotspots. The longest such chain is the Cosgrove Track, displaying a record of volcanic activity from nine to 33 million years ago (see Figure 6.1). But if the Cosgrove volcanoes are long dead, the same cannot be said for a cluster in the south of the continent, the youngest of which is Mt Gambier. Once thought to be of hotspot origin, recent research has proposed that this volcanic activity may instead have been caused by the reactivation of a long-dormant fault system along which magma has fortuitously been able to reach the surface. Yet such activity has barely affected the form of Australia as a whole. Today, being distant from plate boundaries and relatively unaffected by what happens there, the main cause of landscape change in Australia is erosion. This slowly lowers the ground surface and irons out its irregularities, creating massive quantities of detritus that fill those that remain, and thereby creates the vast, apparently featureless plains that dominate the interior.

 

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