These stories are fascinating and I don't doubt there are seeds of very ancient facts preserved for thousands of years in oral traditions. That said, if we don

These stories are fascinating and I don't doubt there are seeds of very ancient facts preserved for thousands of years in oral traditions. That said, if we don't have a reliable way of picking these facts out from the rest of the oral tradition, how useful is this knowledge? Its not like we can go through the rest of the dreamtime corpus and select out other long-lost facts. Which also raises the question - given a big enough oral tradition (assuming for the moment the stories are ALL made up) - what are the chances of finding stories that inadvertently line up with reality?