The Edge of Memory

by Patrick Nunn

  Together, these data imply that human memories can remain alive for many millennia. Others, as yet undocumented, perhaps exist. We should consider the possibility.

  As a final point in this book, consider that if the edge of our memories today lies 10 millennia or so in the past, what of people who lived earlier than this, in those times beyond the edge of memory?

  Our species, modern humans, has been in existence for almost 200,000 years. For much of this time, oral communication has been the main form of knowledge transmission between individuals. But what happened to knowledge that was more than 10,000 years old, which slipped into the abyss over the edge of memory? It became forgotten – just as today much of our ancestors’ knowledge has been forgotten. Was that forgotten knowledge important? Did things have to be rediscovered or reinvented because of that knowledge loss? Absolutely.

  In our species’ history, there are many examples of innovations that did not endure, ideas that probably made life easier for a time but did not last. One of the most obvious refers to the ability of humans to cross water gaps too large to swim. Consider the first people to arrive in Australia, who had to negotiate ocean gaps as much as 70km (43 miles) wide. Obviously they used boats or rafts that were able to make the crossing, a sufficiency involving not only boat-building technology but also maritime and navigational skills. Yet 65,000 years or so after they reached Australia, their descendants had no such skills, and were hardly able to sail far from shore in most cases.6 What happened? Was it simply a case of no longer needing an ability to travel long distances across the ocean, or was it that people just lost the knowledge of how to do so?

  It seems that the history of our species has been marked by an alternation between knowledge acquisition and knowledge loss through gradual memory attenuation. It is probable that in societies that had to cope with especially harsh environments, like those of the Aboriginal Australians, optimally effective techniques for intergenerational knowledge transmission were evolved. Today we look at those societies in awe, as examples of how it might once have been for all of us.

  Notes

  References in these notes are given only to the books listed under Further Reading. Where reference to other sources, typically scholarly articles, cannot be avoided, only their lead author, the year of publication and the journal name (in italics) are given.

  Chapter 1 : Recalling the Past

  1 Hillman described his discovery in the Portland Oregonian newspaper on 3 June 1903. More details at www.craterlakeinstitute.com.

  2 p. 36 in Deur (2002, Oregon Historical Quarterly).

  3 Quoted on p. 39 of Deur (op cit).

  4 You may wonder why the example of the tsunami of 27 March 1964 that impacted many parts of the Cascade coast is not used. It is because even though the earthquake that caused it occurred above a zone of plate convergence, it was generated off the south coast of Alaska, not locally.

  5 A comprehensive account of the 1700 tsunami, nicknamed the ‘orphan tsunami’ because the earthquake that caused it has not been identified, is provided in the book by Brian Atwater and colleagues (2005), which painstakingly pieces together its effects along the continental margins of the North Pacific.

  6 The parallels between this story and that of Persephone in Greek mythology are striking yet must be coincidental. Like Loha, the beautiful Persephone lived on the Earth’s surface but was abducted by Hades, the God of the Underworld, who was in love with her (and up against some stiff competition). Hades kept Persephone in his underworld kingdom until ordered by Zeus to return her to the above-ground world. But Hades had ensured that Persephone had tasted the food of the underworld (pomegranate seeds), something that compelled her to return there to his cold embrace for several months each year.

  7 From pp. 53–55 of Clark (1953). The most convincing interpretation of this story is in the magnificent book When They Severed Earth from Sky: How the Human Mind Shapes Myth (Barber and Barber 2004).

  8 The most convincing dates come from the tephra (ash deposits) blown out of Mt Mazama across a wide area during its terminal eruption. Radiocarbon dating of associated materials, such as wood fragments and rat faeces, within the tephra deposits shows that they were laid down between 7,682 and 7,584 calendar years BP (Before Present, where ‘present’ is ad 1950) (Egan, 2015, The Holocene).

  9 This quote and the other below it come from the translation of the key oral history by Beaglehole and Beaglehole (1938: 386). Around 85km (53 miles) from the nearest inhabited land – the equally remote Nassau Island – Pukapuka is 175ha (432 acres) in area and rises mostly less than 2m (6½ft) above sea level. Some 600 people live there today.

  10 The original text is on p. 116 in the book by Ricci (1969). The translation given here is on pp. 316–317 in the paper by Santilli and others (2003, Antiquity). Other quotes in this section come from the same source. Note that the calibrated radiocarbon age for the impact (ad 412) is unlikely to be its exact age.

  11 It is possible that the Dionysian temple referred to was converted to the Church of Santa Maria della Consolazione at Secinaro.

  12 The oldest known fossils of Homo sapiens are found in Ethiopia and are consistent with genetic evidence suggesting the emergence of our species about 200,000 years ago in the region (Gibbons, 2003, Science). See also Chapter 4.

  13 Our hominid ancestor, Homo erectus, moved out of Africa, where it had evolved, to reach both China and Java more than 1,600,000 years ago. While H. erectus did not have the cognitive abilities of our species, its presence on Flores Island (Indonesia) at least 800,000 years ago shows that it was able to cross ocean distances of at least 19km (12 miles) (Morwood, 1998, Nature).

  14 Of the clam species living today along the shores of the Red Sea, Tridacna costata comprises fewer than 1 per cent. Yet this species comprises about 80 per cent of the fossil shells found in the ancient shoreline of the region, demonstrating that it was once far more common. The association between these fossil shells of T. costata and human artefacts shows that its predation by people began at least 125,000 years ago.

  15 Owing to the comparative abundance of food resources along the coasts of South Asia, it is generally thought that the dispersal of Homo sapiens east out of Africa followed a coastal route, most likely between about 70,000 and 130,000 years ago.

  16 Perhaps they inferred that land existed because they saw smoke rising from distant wildfires. Perhaps they observed birds flying south and not returning, from which they deduced that a sizeable land mass with abundant resources existed in that direction.

  17 Beyond the scope of this book is the question of what came before language. It was probably gestural communication – based on signs – that may have evolved into speech through echo phonology, ‘a repertoire of mouth actions which are characterized by “echoing” on the mouth certain of the articulatory actions of the hands’ (Woll, 2014, Frontiers in Psychology, p. 1).

  18 Ever insightful, it was Jonathan Kingdon who suggested in his book Self-made Man (1996) that, once humans reached continental shores, they were no longer able to hunt and gather their food at the cooler (low sun) times of the day they preferred. Instead they became dependent on the tides, even sometimes having to walk out across reefs collecting shellfish at the hottest times of the day. Over time, people with darker skins became more successful at this, and less likely to suffer sunstroke or contract skin cancer, thereby resulting in a gradual darkening of human skin colour in parts of the world like coastal South-east Asia 70,000 years ago. Kingdon names the first people of this area with black (rather than brown) skins, the Banda, and speculates that their seafaring skills may have started with the building of rafts on which seafoods could be piled, then progressed to platforms on which people could sit, and eventually to mobile watercraft.

  19 The Wallace Line separates Bali from Lombok, Borneo from Sulawesi. On the Asian side (commonly called Sunda) are found land animals like orang-utans and rhinoceroses that are not found on the Australasian (commonly called Sahul) side, wh
ere an abundance of unique fauna (83 per cent of it endemic) – including kangaroos and koalas – exists.

  20 The most efficient way that people could have crossed from the now-submerged extension of the Asian continental shelf to that of the Australian shelf would have been from south-east Borneo across Sulawesi Island to New Guinea, a route requiring eight ocean crossings, the largest being 70km (43 miles); from New Guinea at that time, it was a dry-foot walk to modern Australia. The earliest known date for a human presence in Australia and New Guinea comes from the Malakunanja rock shelter on the side of the valley of the East Alligator River in the Northern Territory. This rock shelter was occupied 52,000–61,000 years ago, but, being some 220km (137 miles) from the coast at this time, is likely to have been reached at least a millennium or two after the first human arrivals. More details in Chapter 2.

  21 Many Aboriginal Australians reject ‘Western’ scientific ideas about their ancestors ‘coming’ to Australia from anywhere. Like many indigenous peoples, a belief that they have always ‘been here’ [where they are now] is commonplace. An insightful biographical extract, quoted by van den Berg (2002: 4), reports that:

  As a child, around campfire talks with my parents … I would ask, ‘Where did we come from?’

  Their reply was, ‘We’ve always lived here.’ I accepted that explanation.

  As I grew older and matured, I would ask the same question and get the same answer. ‘We’ve always lived here.’

  Later in my learned wisdom of European ways, I would reply, ‘But white fellas say we come from overseas, from Asia.’

  ‘Well,’ they said, ‘Those wujbullas are talking out of their nooroos [their backsides]. They don’t know anything. Our Dreamtime stories tell us our Rainbow Serpent made us and our land, our Mother. We belong here, to this country … and don’t you forget it.’

  It is worth reflecting that there is no direct evidence that anyone 65,000 years or so ago crossed 70km (43 miles) of ocean between South-east Asia and Australasia – although the weight of inference suggests that they did.

  22 I am aware this paints a fairly idealistic picture, fine for the purpose of generalisation but unrealistic when applied to the evolution of particular societies. When considering how societies diverged (and came to speak different languages) in the past, a process that can be tracked by genetics, it is often thought that language facilitated knowledge dissemination and that inequalities which appeared between different groups were a result of their respective histories. But it seems more likely that language was not used to freely communicate knowledge but rather to selectively withhold it, thereby creating a situation in which one group was better able to survive than another (Iain Davidson and Bill Noble, 1992, Archaeology in Oceania).

  23 Urban centres are defined here as settlements large enough and complex enough to support people having roles other than those of primary food producers. Dates of around 7,000 years ago for the establishment of complex ‘villages’ in the Yangtze lowlands may qualify these as urban, although 1,000 years later in the same area, supported by rice agriculture, walled and moated cities were built.

  24 Mesopotamian cities of note include Tell Brak (Syria), first established about 7,000 years or so ago. Recent research suggests that urbanisation in this so-called Fertile Crescent was a ‘phased and pulsating phenomenon’ rather than a continuous process (Lawrence, 2015, Antiquity). The agro-pastoral strategies were centred on the floodplain cultivation of wheat, barley and lentils, with olives and grapes in wetter areas complemented by domesticated food animals like pigs, then increasingly by sheep and goats as time went on. The latter also facilitated wool-based textile production in the region.

  25 The evolution of imagination (and the associated vocabulary) is a subject of some debate. Humans may be the only extant species that uses imagination to help process things we perceive (Bronowski 1974). There is debate about whether the human imagination is innate (perhaps stimulated by dreams) and indeed defines us as a species, or whether it derives solely from the reception (typically through observation) and processing of external stimuli. At the moment, I favour the latter and draw an explicit link between our ancestors’ observations of memorable natural phenomena (like volcanic eruptions, meteorite showers and giant waves) and mythmaking that underpins much of today’s creative practice, including art and literature.

  26 The subject of a notable compilation by Dorothy Vitaliano (1973).

  27 My own research on the island of Kadavu (Fiji) highlights just such a situation (see also Chapter 6). At one time, the forest-cloaked volcanic mountain named Nabukelevu at the western extremity of Kadavu was assumed to be extinct, last erupting perhaps 50,000 years ago. But then there are myths from the nearby island of Ono that could be interpreted as observations of eruptions of Nabukelevu. Since people have been in Fiji for only about 3,000 years, these myths imply that the volcano is unlikely to be truly extinct. More recently a road cut along the base of Nabukelevu revealed pottery fragments covered by volcanic scoria – a sure sign that the most recent eruptions postdated human arrival in the area – and a validation of the myth.

  28 These include the Big Island (Hawai’i) in the Hawaiian Islands, which is the highest single mountain on Earth, reaching more than 10km (6 miles) above the surrounding ocean floor. Through its Kilauea parasite, Hawai’i has been erupting continuously since 1983.

  29 I analysed the Maui legends of the Pacific Ocean and explained how their foci appear to coincide with recent shallow-water volcanism (Nunn, 2003, Annals of the Association of American Geographers).

  30 In his landmark 1982 book Orality and Literacy, Father Walter Ong wrote that ‘oral cultures indeed produce powerful and beautiful verbal performances of high artistic and human worth, which are no longer even possible once writing has taken possession of the psyche. Nevertheless, without writing, human consciousness cannot achieve its fuller potentials, cannot produce other beautiful and powerful creations’ (p. 14).

  31 The argument is that at one time most human females died shortly after they reached childbearing age, but when an increasing number began to survive into older age and became grandmothers, they (and to a lesser their male counterparts) became key in imparting traditional knowledge to their grandchildren (Caspari, 2004, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America).

  32 This is the mnemonic effect, elegantly described by Lynne Kelly (2016).

  33 Traces of San ancestors – including spearheads, notched bones, warthog tusks and ostrich eggshell beads – have been found in Border Cave, South Africa, and dated unequivocally to somewhere between 45,000 and 60,000 years ago.

  34 p. 243 in Guenther (2006, Journal of Folklore Research).

  35 p. 113 in the chapter by Hough in a collection on Myth and Geology (Piccardi and Masse 2007).

  36 p. S79 in Hunn and others (2003, Current Anthropology).

  37 p. S87 in Hunn and others (op cit). The Tlingit had several other notable conservation practices designed to maintain supplies of particular food resources, including an avoidance of the use of paralytic fish poisons (used by many other cultural groups) that have unintended effects on many other nearshore marine food sources, particularly shellfish.

  38 This is based on research at the Ozette archaeological site on the Washington coast, where it was found that fur-seal populations had not been discernibly affected by human predation in the period ad 1100–1800. It should be pointed out that not all such interactions between indigenous peoples and wild foods were so apparently sustainable. There are innumerable examples of instances where hunger evidently took precedence over any sense of sustaining a future supply of a particular food resource.

  39 In his poem ‘The World-Soul’, Emerson compared the present where ‘the politics are base’ and ‘the letters do not cheer’ with a place ‘far in the depths of history’ where we find that ‘voice that speaketh clear’.

  40 Two pairs of woollen trousers (long pants) made and worn about 3,000 years ago
have been excavated from an archaeological site at the Turfan Oasis in western China (Beck, 2014, Quaternary International). It is likely that they were invented to allow horseback riders to remain comfortably for longer in the saddle, something that allowed more efficient and widespread communication at the time.

  Chapter 2 : Words that Matter in a Harsh Land

  1 We do know that water availability was the single most important control on early (Aboriginal) exploration of Australia. Eighty-four per cent of archaeological sites more than 30,000 years old in Australia are within 20km (12 miles) of permanent water. And there were several adequately watered routes into the arid interior of the continent available to potential Aboriginal settlers (Bird, O’Grady and Ulm, 2016, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences).

  2 The semi-arid lands in much of the Murray-Darling Basin contain huge quantities of salt that in places wash into the rivers and the groundwater. Not derived from bedrock (as you might expect), this salt is of largely aeolian origin, carried to the area by winds from the ocean and deposited in clay mantles across the ground surface. Today the extraction of salt from groundwater allows water better suited for agriculture to reach productive areas downstream, and also produces crystalline salt in commercial quantities.

  3 The quote is from Sturt (1834: 108). I cannot resist adding Sturt’s story of his encounter with kangaroo flies: ‘We remained stationary the day after we left the range, with a view to enjoying a little rest; it would, however, have been infinitely better if we had moved forward. Our camp was infested by the kangaroo fly, which settled upon us in thousands. They appeared to rise from the ground, and as fast as they were swept off were succeeded by fresh numbers. It was utterly impossible to avoid their persecution, penetrating as they did into the very tents. The men were obliged to put handkerchiefs over their faces, and stockings upon their hands; but they bit through every thing. It was to no purpose that I myself shifted from place to place; they still followed, or were equally numerous everywhere. To add to our discomfort, the [pack] animals were driven almost to madness, and galloped to and fro in so furious a manner that I was apprehensive some of them would have been lost. I never experienced such a day of torment; and only when the sun set, did these little creatures cease from their attacks’ (p. 71).