by Patrick Nunn
Australia also had many large birds (dromornithids) – taller and larger bodied than today’s native emus and cassowaries – which have been extinct for millennia, including one (Genyornis newtoni) that may feature in Aboriginal artwork and stories (see colour plate section). As for the bunyip (see above), this possibility suggests that some of the extinct megafaunal species co-existed with people in Australia for some time, implying that the overkill model may not apply here. This is something of a departure from earlier views that envisaged most species of large-bodied mammals in Australia becoming extinct more than 40,000 years ago as a result of their rapid overkill by recently arrived humans.
The first data-informed suggestion that humans and megafauna had co-existed in Australia for at least 15,000 years came from measurements of rare-earth elements (REE) in megafaunal bones. The context of this research was that such bones had long been recognised in comparatively young sedimentary sequences, such as river terraces, but had been suggested as not being in situ. In other words, it was argued that these bones must have been moved (typically by flood waters) from the places where the animals died much earlier, to become incorporated within these much more recent landforms. If this scenario is correct, then the pattern of REEs in the buried bones would be expected to be quite different from that in the water filling the pores in the sediments enclosing the bones. Analysis of a whole series of megafaunal bones from Cuddie Springs in south-east Australia showed otherwise, leading to the conclusion that people (at least here) did not rapidly deplete Australian megafauna following their earliest encounters with them.62
This then raises the likelihood that it was climate change rather than humans – or a combination of factors – that drove megafaunal extinction in Australia. But the mechanisms are ‘fiercely contested’ and most recent scientific commentary still favours humans as the principal cause of this. A case in point is the timing of megafaunal extinction on Tasmania. While most megafauna on mainland Australia became extinct some 46,000 years ago, implicating expansionist humans, megafauna on Tasmania were once thought to have disappeared before humans reached this now-offshore island, exonerating human predation and implicating climate change. Yet improved dating of megafaunal remains from Tasmania tells a different story. It has shown that humans overlapped for just a couple of millennia with megafauna here, many of which they pursued across the land bridge then linking Tasmania with the Australian mainland, before exterminating them.63
It was several thousand years ago in southern Australia. Nothing stirred in the midday heat, the gum trees stood in desultory clusters. Within their foliage perched half a dozen Aboriginal hunters, unmoving, their barbed spears poised at arm’s length ready to dispatch with maximum speed in an instant. Their scent made the giant flightless birds they hunted inquisitive yet unsuspecting. Slowly a group moved closer to the trees, within spearing distance. Standing over 2m (6½ft) tall, their ‘heads … as high as the hills’, these birds – mihirung paringmal to the Tjapwurung hunters – were feared for their vicious kicks, which could easily ‘kill a man’, yet prized for the huge amounts of meat even one would provide for the community. Closing on the trees in which the hunters waited, the birds peered upwards and, at the agreed signal, the hunters launched their spears in unison. The birds ran, faster than could any person, but those most severely wounded eventually collapsed and were dispatched by the pursuing hunters.64
It has been proposed that the mihirung was Genyornis newtoni, a flightless bird (averaging 275kg/606lb in weight) that was one of a number of huge-bodied dromornithids that once occupied most of Australia. Excavated Genyornis bones have been identified by Aboriginal informants as being from what they knew as mihirung and there are also rock-art images that appear to show this bird (see colour plate section).65 If correct, this suggests that far from being an early casualty of human contact like many other species of Australian megafauna, Genyornis did in fact survive until comparatively recently. Debate rages. Most scientists do not believe there is any evidence for Genyornis having lived within the past 41,000 years, while others take a contrasting view.66 The answer may lie in an egg.
Found typically in eroding sand dunes along Australian coasts, a distinct type of fossil eggshell has long captured the attention of palaeontologists. Reconstructed eggs – none have been found unbroken – typically have a long axis of around 16cm (6¼in), far larger than emu eggs, and are smooth as opposed to having the crenulated exterior of these. For some 30 years, it was generally believed that these eggs were those of Genyornis newtoni, and radiocarbon ages from them in every part of Australia have been used to argue a recent date for Genyornis extinction, perhaps just a few millennia ago. But then some nagging suspicions began to surface. For instance, the sizes of the reconstructed eggs are improbably small given the likely size of Genyornis. More recently, chemical analyses of the eggshells led researchers to conclude that they are ‘unlikely to have been laid by a dromornithid, whereas several characters support a megapode origin’.67
There are several species of megapode living today in Australia. They either bury their eggs in natural deposits (like sand dunes), or build mounds where these are lacking. Giant megapodes once existed, too, and because of their characteristically outsize eggs would probably have become rapidly extinct upon making contact with egg-eating humans. So it seems that these eggs belonged to a giant megapode and not to Genyornis. The implications of this deduction are huge, for much of what has been previously inferred about the diet and time of extinction of Genyornis newtoni (mistakenly obtained from megapode eggshell) is now incorrect. This leaves open the question of whether Genyornis survived longer, even long enough to have humans recall how best it was hunted and to paint how it appeared.68
The most likely scenario for the extinction of Australian megafauna is that many species were in fact driven rapidly to extinction following early contacts with people, but that others, perhaps because of where they lived or how effectively they were able to dodge (and reproduce away from) human predators, survived much longer than the blitzkrieg 41,000 years ago. It is possible that some species of megafauna became extinct only within the past few thousand years, and that Aboriginal stories of the bunyip and kindred creatures may have their roots in observations of now-extinct megafauna. Of course this raises the possibility that the same may apply in other parts of the world.
The next chapter discusses ways of measuring other types of story (folk tales, for example), and where the new frontiers of knowledge of oral history may lie. It concludes by asking whether we have underestimated ourselves by denying that oral recollections can reflect human history across a far greater time span than we might intuitively suppose.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Have We Underestimated Ourselves?
By understanding that there are stories which have survived through largely oral means in our collective human psyche for several thousand years, not merely in isolated or anomalous situations, we are inevitably drawn to wonder whether in fact we have underestimated ourselves. As individuals, do we perhaps know stories that we have instinctively regarded as being of recent origin, but which are in fact far more ancient echoes of observations made – or stories invented – by our distant ancestors? Or as members of the human society, or cultural subgroups within it, do we have access to information – perhaps written, perhaps only oral recollection – that is of a considerable antiquity, significantly greater than we hitherto suspected? Today, the answers to both questions appear likely to be ‘yes’.
We privilege the written word over the oral because, for most of us reading this book, this is what we have been uncritically trained to do. The culmination of our formal education was to learn essential knowledge through reading, not from our grandparents’ rambling reminiscences of passing worlds. But consider that for most of the time – at least 90 per cent of the time in most of the world’s cultures – humans have received knowledge only through the spoken words of others, usually our ancestors. Do we unquestioningly assume
that all that knowledge was written down when our ancestors became literate? Even for a tiny proportion of that knowledge, this assumption seems improbable because, as numerous examples in this book demonstrate, some of the discoveries that we have made through scientific investigations and that we therefore regard as ‘new’ knowledge are in fact ‘old’ knowledge.
Our ancestors witnessed the rising of ocean levels after the end of the last ice age, and the often dramatic changes it wrought in coastal landscapes worldwide. In some places – Australia, north-west Europe and India – people successfully passed on their observations of coastal drowning for hundreds of generations into the age of literacy and hence down to us today. What science has discovered in the last 100 years or so about postglacial sea-level rise confirms the eyewitness accounts of our ancestors, not the other way round.
It is the same with stories of volcanic eruptions, meteorite impacts, and islands in the ocean basins that disappeared. Perhaps it is even the same in the case of now-extinct animals with which our ancient ancestors once rubbed shoulders. Yet because many such stories were first reported to a literate world, typically within the past 200 years, from the mouths of non-literate peoples, we have long regarded these stories as anthropological curiosities, expressions of oral cultures that are inherently inferior to the expressions of literate, science-informed cultures. That also seems to have been mistaken. With hindsight there is no doubt that science, especially in its younger days, could have benefited from treating oral traditions and knowledge more seriously. Some would no doubt argue that we might still benefit significantly from taking many non-literate sources of knowledge more seriously.
For example, Aboriginal Australians understood clearly that drought every few years led to massive bush fires in Australia, but that these might be contained in extent and ferocity by proactively reducing the amount of dry fuel load; current environmental management in Australia and elsewhere could indeed benefit from closer study of Indigenous practices. And in those societies where high levels of non-literacy exist today, there are numerous examples of how oral knowledge about particular phenomena – from the management of coastal risk in Kerala (India) to the recognition of tsunami and eruption precursors on islands like Simeulue (Indonesia) and Savo (Solomon Islands) – is favoured by local people over the (often inappropriate) solutions, underpinned by Western science, which many national or regional managers instinctively favour.1
Despite such positive examples of the usefulness of oral knowledge – and there are numerous others – this information source has also been long undervalued because its ancientness has rarely been able to be demonstrated. Unless we can demonstrate that a particular oral tradition is ancient, perhaps several thousand years old, rather than something a group of people invented a few weeks back, the argument often goes, why should we treat it seriously? With oral traditions, antiquity is a coarse proxy for veracity. And for such ‘traditional’ knowledge to be able to compete with scientific knowledge, it has to be verifiable – as scientific deductions generally are.
Science allows us to give credibility to many oral traditions. The main focus of this book – Australian Aboriginal stories of coastal drowning – involves the use of sea-level science to demonstrate that such stories in Australia must be at least seven millennia old. Radiometric dating allows us to know that Klamath stories of Mt Mazama date from around 7,600 years back. And so on.
Ways of measuring the antiquity of other types of story have also been developed recently and show great promise for the future.
A little girl in a hooded red jacket walks, somewhat apprehensively, through the woods to her grandmother’s house, clutching a basket of bread and apples. But instead of finding her grandmother home, she encounters a wolf in her bed, disguised, and – depending on the version of the story – she is either eaten or rescued and the wolf is killed. Known to English readers as Little Red Riding Hood, the earliest written version of the story was Le Petit Chaperon Rouge in 1697 by Charles Perrault, widely credited as the first writer of fairy tales. Yet as Perrault happily acknowledged, the sources for his fairy tales – which also included the first written accounts of Cinderella, Puss in Boots and Sleeping Beauty – lay in popular oral stories that had been told for generations in Europe. But for exactly how many generations? Can we know?
We can indeed find an answer to this question by applying to stories the same kind of tools that biologists have long used for tracing the evolution of species. This process involves identifying diagnostic characteristics of a range of species, deciding which characteristics and what proportion of these are shared between species at several points in time, then drawing up a phylogenetic tree to illustrate the likely process of species evolution. An analogous process is used to analyse the evolution of stories like Little Red Riding Hood and thereby pinpoint the time (and sometimes place) of their earliest expression. In short, the process begins with identifying key motifs within different versions of a particular story and those in others similar to it; such motifs might be the existence of a fairy godmother, the use of a magic ring or even the activities of a giant kangaroo.2 Any combination of motifs that tells a story is a ‘tale type’, and it is tale types that provide the raw material for phylogenetic analyses of oral-written stories.
The Little Red Riding Hood story and its close relative, The Wolf and the Kids, have been found in 58 versions from numerous cultural traditions in Europe, but also in Africa and East Asia. On the assumption that the geographical concentration of tale types sharing the greatest number of defining motifs is likely to be the source of these tales, the indication is that this particular story originated as an oral tradition in the eastern Mediterranean at least 2,000 years ago, and was first written down in Greece as a fable in about ad 400. From here, the story spread along the Silk Road to China, across the Mediterranean to Africa, both orally and in writing, evolving different characteristics as it was adopted and reframed by other cultures.3
Phylogenetic analysis of such stories, like many of those quoted earlier in this book, holds great potential for understanding the ways in which particular tales evolved, and when and where they are likely to have originated. But whereas such analysis focuses on trying to understand the ways in which particular tales have changed across the centuries and millennia that people have been telling (or reading) them, most of the Australian Aboriginal stories recounted here appear to have changed so little that their commonalities are readily detectable, whether they refer to coastal drowning or to volcanic eruptions and kindred phenomena.
In the cases of both the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale and Aboriginal stories about the time, perhaps 10 millennia ago, when the Great Barrier Reef was the coastline, recent research has demonstrated with a high degree of plausibility that humans can pass on memories for several thousand years without the assistance of literacy. This, I feel, should make scientists of many different hues sit up and consider whether we have underestimated ourselves – whether, caught up in the whirlwind of literacy and all its attendant possibilities, we have discarded something valuable – its antecedents.4
So where is the edge of memory, the point in time beyond which humankind has no direct record?
It lies probably more than 10 millennia ago but perhaps nowhere near 20. It is not that a case cannot be made for the latter, but simply that applying the law of parsimony – which tells us to choose the simplest scientific explanation of the facts – makes it improbable.5 In this book, examples of oral memories of events that apparently occurred more than 10,000 years ago have been related, but the precise antiquity of many is difficult to assess, either because the event (like an eruption or a landslide) has itself proved difficult to date, or because the errors inherent in many dating techniques unavoidably reduce precision.
Consider the first of these points. With many ‘drowning stories’, for instance, the depth below the present sea level to which a particular story refers is often difficult to fix. For example, do the ubiquitous Aborig
inal stories of the time when the Great Barrier Reef was the coastline refer to a sea level 10, 45 or even 65 metres below the present sea level? It makes a huge difference to the minimum age of these stories. And if a lava flow is too weathered to date directly, how close are the ‘minimum’ or ‘maximum’ ages obtained from proxy eruption indicators to its formation? It also makes a difference.
Then you have the second point, the fact that most dating techniques are imprecise. Radiometric dating techniques produce results that are expressed as age ranges, a function of the techniques used. Other techniques, such as linking drowning stories to envelopes showing how sea levels changed in the past, often amplify those kinds of error.
But these are caveats. They should not deter us from pursuing ways of measuring the antiquity of oral traditions, of calibrating the longevity of memory.
Stories of coastal drowning from five places in Australia appear (see Table 4.1) to date from more than 9,000 years ago, and perhaps over 13,000 years ago. Of these five, the most compelling are likely to be those from Spencer Gulf (9,330–12,460 years ago) and Kangaroo Island (10,080–10,950 years ago). Elsewhere in the world, drowning stories of similar antiquity may be preserved for Baie de Douarnenez in France (perhaps 8,750–10,650 years ago) and Cardigan Bay in Wales (perhaps 9,000–10,250 years ago). There are many other drowning stories dating from more than 6,000 years ago.
Then there are other types of story, including the Australian Aboriginal memories of the Tyrendarra lava flow from Mt Eccles (more than 10,500 years ago) and the formation of the maar volcano at modern Lake Eacham (9,130 years ago), the explosive eruption and caldera formation at Mt Mazama in the western United States (7,600 years ago), and perhaps even the landslide-damming of the Citarum River at Tangkuban Perahu in Indonesia (16,000 years ago?).
