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I find it utterly fascinating how long were humans capable of passing the information just by word of mouth. If I understood it correctly, in this case people w

I find it utterly fascinating how long were humans capable of passing the information just by word of mouth. If I understood it correctly, in this case people were wary for 2000 years, so for around 100 generations.

alophawen 5y ago
Not sure what you mean here. The article explains how this was uncovered by archaeological studies.
- i_like_waiting 5y ago
  "Archaeological evidence reveals that people abandoned the coast for centuries after the disaster." "The sea has always been vital to life in the Atacama, but it's clear that, for centuries, no one wanted to live too close." But no idea how I came to 2000yrs number
  - 34679 5y ago
    "Life in the Atacama took 2,000 years to return to normal." Just beneath the title.
    - afterburner 5y ago
      Recovery can be slow without debt financing...
      - vmception 5y ago
        another way to wind up underwater
mazsa 5y ago
My favorite word of mouth story is about a tsunami as well: https://web.archive.org/web/20120322110734/http://mdn.mainichi.jp/perspectives/pulse/news/20120319p2a00m0na020000c.html https://web.archive.org/web/20120322110734/http://mdn.mainic... edit: No. This is the real word of mouth story: "Some 50 generations later, on March 11, 2011, the Murohama tsunami warning tower — which was supposed to sound an alarm — was silent, toppled by the temblor. Still, without the benefit of an official warning system supported by modern science, the locals relied on the lesson that had been transmitted generation to generation for 1,000 years. “We all know the story about the two tsunami waves that collided at the shrine,” I was told. Instead of taking refuge on the closest hill, the one with the shrine, they took the time to get to high ground farther away. From the safety of their vantage point they saw two tsunami waves colliding at the hill with the shrine, as they did long ago. Tragically, not everyone made the right choice; I was told of at least one person who died." https://www.latimes.com/opinion/la-xpm-2012-mar-11-la-oe-holguin-veras-tsunami-20120311-story.html https://www.latimes.com/opinion/la-xpm-2012-mar-11-la-oe-hol...
- awb 5y ago
  Japan also has tsunami stones in some coastal communities: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/century-old-warnings-against-tsunamis-dot-japans-coastline-180956448/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/century-old-warnin...
toss1 5y ago
Exactly - quite impressive. Our modern society has vastly better data, unimaginable completeness in scale, scope, detail, and accuracy. Yet we are consistently making insanely worse decisions than the ones that returned 2000 years after the disaster. That hundred-generation perspective makes the Native American's 'Consider the Seventh Generation' ethos seem myopic. Worse yet is our society's obsession on quarterly profits and this month's competitive positioning — makes the attention span of a cloud of coked-up gnats seem positively sagacious >>And of course, people returned to the shoreline eventually, as people in tsunami zones around the world inevitably do and apparently always have done. "Knowledge of these giant events and their consequences seems to wane over the passage of time, a common occurrence throughout the Pacific region . . . Most of the hazard assessments for coastal northern Chile are based on historical data that goes back just a few centuries, but the fault system in the region runs on a much larger temporal scale. Data about ancient quakes and tsunamis like the one that reshaped society here 3,800 years ago could offer a longer-term perspective to hazard planners."
JoeAltmaier 5y ago
I'm doubtful. While individuals may respond to stories, cultures and settlement grow vegetatively. Communities would have grown back, and to my untutored mind in less than a century. Unless the ecosystem was upset, which it was. Small camps that returned after the tsunami show a narrower diet, which is a red flag? I imagine folks didn't return because the food chain was disrupted, and they couldn't return.
Spooky23 5y ago
There are many examples of this sort of thing. In Western societies many of the “universal” myths may be correlated to events 10,000+ years ago, yet persist!
- eesmith 5y ago
  Which ones? I thought the oldest oral stories were from Aboriginal Australians, like "Aboriginal Memories of Inundation of the Australian Coast Dating from More than 7000 Years Ago" - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00049182.2015.1077539 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00049182.2015.10... . The Black Sea deluge hypothesis for the flood myth was only 7,600 years ago and Lake Agassiz 8,200 year ago.
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    Sea level rose continuously from 20,000 until 8000 years ago, 120 m in all. Each of 600 generations experienced its own deluge as the shore moved inland, often hundreds of miles all told. Local events were often more dramatic, maybe including the Black Sea filling in. Then there was the global Younger Dryas cataclysm 12,000 years ago.
    - eesmith 5y ago
      Thing is, while all those global- or continental-scale flooding events did happen, there's only speculation that they are coupled to oral traditions. And stronger speculation that they are linked to more regional floods, eg, from flood-prone Mesopotamia. We can look at the Great Flood of Gun to see how mythology incorporates more localized floods - sea level rise wouldn't cause flooding of the Yellow River and the Yangtze valleys some 4,000 years ago. As the paper I cited says: > While there are a few claims of considerably greater antiquity that are difficult to dismiss—the Klamath memory of the 7630-year-old eruption of Mt Mazama (Deur 2002) is one—most of these are inevitably based on sparse information from which credible arguments are difficult to construct. Most scientists hold a sceptical view of such ‘deep’ oral histories (Henige2009; Owsley and Jantz 2001), a position that is prudent, although there are some who regard it as unduly cautious (Echo-Hawk 2000) then listing much more concrete examples of how local myths can be tied to global sea level rise, for example: > Some of these stories recall that the Aboriginal name of Fitzroy Island is gabaɽor ‘lower arm’ of a former main-land promontory that became partly submerged. Another recalls the name of a place halfway between Fitzroy Island and King Beach that is now submerged; its name was Mudaga (the Indindji word for the pencil pine, Athrotaxis cupressoides) after the trees growing there along with an explanation for why these stories might have persisted: > the only plausible explanation for the Indindji people of coastal Queensland continuing to tell the story of Mudaga ... for thousands of years after it was no longer visible, is if that story were part of an explicitly taught package of stories inherited through land-owning Indindji patrilines. For the existence of Mudaga, even submerged, constitutes evidence of knowing one’s country, and thus establishing one’s relationship with that country. Without such ritualised framing, the transmission of such stories across perhaps over 100 generations would seem to be implausibly vulnerable to chance link-breaking The connection between the Gilgamesh floods and global sea-level rise, or the Black Sea, etc., has no comparable evidence.
layer8 5y ago
Maybe it could be explained by each new generation asking their parents why nobody is dwelling near the coast. Meaning, the information is passed down because it is necessary to explain the current situation. The passed-down explanation may even mutate significantly, as long as it still keeps people away from the coast.
hemreldop 5y ago
Pretty sure all the Vedas were passed down for millennia as word of mouth. The aborigines seem to have stories of floods from 10,000 years ago.
mark336 5y ago
Its not too unfathomable. Indigenous people are around today and they pass on lore to their youth the same way. Also looks like they use paint to make drawings. Probably recorded some of their history too.

alophawen 5y ago

Not sure what you mean here. The article explains how this was uncovered by archaeological studies.

i_like_waiting 5y ago
"Archaeological evidence reveals that people abandoned the coast for centuries after the disaster." "The sea has always been vital to life in the Atacama, but it's clear that, for centuries, no one wanted to live too close." But no idea how I came to 2000yrs number
- 34679 5y ago
  "Life in the Atacama took 2,000 years to return to normal." Just beneath the title.
  - afterburner 5y ago
    Recovery can be slow without debt financing...
    - vmception 5y ago
      another way to wind up underwater

mazsa 5y ago

My favorite word of mouth story is about a tsunami as well: https://web.archive.org/web/20120322110734/http://mdn.mainichi.jp/perspectives/pulse/news/20120319p2a00m0na020000c.html https://web.archive.org/web/20120322110734/http://mdn.mainic... edit: No. This is the real word of mouth story: "Some 50 generations later, on March 11, 2011, the Murohama tsunami warning tower — which was supposed to sound an alarm — was silent, toppled by the temblor. Still, without the benefit of an official warning system supported by modern science, the locals relied on the lesson that had been transmitted generation to generation for 1,000 years. “We all know the story about the two tsunami waves that collided at the shrine,” I was told. Instead of taking refuge on the closest hill, the one with the shrine, they took the time to get to high ground farther away. From the safety of their vantage point they saw two tsunami waves colliding at the hill with the shrine, as they did long ago. Tragically, not everyone made the right choice; I was told of at least one person who died." https://www.latimes.com/opinion/la-xpm-2012-mar-11-la-oe-holguin-veras-tsunami-20120311-story.html https://www.latimes.com/opinion/la-xpm-2012-mar-11-la-oe-hol...

awb 5y ago
Japan also has tsunami stones in some coastal communities: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/century-old-warnings-against-tsunamis-dot-japans-coastline-180956448/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/century-old-warnin...

toss1 5y ago

Exactly - quite impressive. Our modern society has vastly better data, unimaginable completeness in scale, scope, detail, and accuracy. Yet we are consistently making insanely worse decisions than the ones that returned 2000 years after the disaster. That hundred-generation perspective makes the Native American's 'Consider the Seventh Generation' ethos seem myopic. Worse yet is our society's obsession on quarterly profits and this month's competitive positioning — makes the attention span of a cloud of coked-up gnats seem positively sagacious >>And of course, people returned to the shoreline eventually, as people in tsunami zones around the world inevitably do and apparently always have done. "Knowledge of these giant events and their consequences seems to wane over the passage of time, a common occurrence throughout the Pacific region . . . Most of the hazard assessments for coastal northern Chile are based on historical data that goes back just a few centuries, but the fault system in the region runs on a much larger temporal scale. Data about ancient quakes and tsunamis like the one that reshaped society here 3,800 years ago could offer a longer-term perspective to hazard planners."

JoeAltmaier 5y ago

I'm doubtful. While individuals may respond to stories, cultures and settlement grow vegetatively. Communities would have grown back, and to my untutored mind in less than a century. Unless the ecosystem was upset, which it was. Small camps that returned after the tsunami show a narrower diet, which is a red flag? I imagine folks didn't return because the food chain was disrupted, and they couldn't return.

Spooky23 5y ago

There are many examples of this sort of thing. In Western societies many of the “universal” myths may be correlated to events 10,000+ years ago, yet persist!

eesmith 5y ago
Which ones? I thought the oldest oral stories were from Aboriginal Australians, like "Aboriginal Memories of Inundation of the Australian Coast Dating from More than 7000 Years Ago" - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00049182.2015.1077539 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00049182.2015.10... . The Black Sea deluge hypothesis for the flood myth was only 7,600 years ago and Lake Agassiz 8,200 year ago.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  Sea level rose continuously from 20,000 until 8000 years ago, 120 m in all. Each of 600 generations experienced its own deluge as the shore moved inland, often hundreds of miles all told. Local events were often more dramatic, maybe including the Black Sea filling in. Then there was the global Younger Dryas cataclysm 12,000 years ago.
  - eesmith 5y ago
    Thing is, while all those global- or continental-scale flooding events did happen, there's only speculation that they are coupled to oral traditions. And stronger speculation that they are linked to more regional floods, eg, from flood-prone Mesopotamia. We can look at the Great Flood of Gun to see how mythology incorporates more localized floods - sea level rise wouldn't cause flooding of the Yellow River and the Yangtze valleys some 4,000 years ago. As the paper I cited says: > While there are a few claims of considerably greater antiquity that are difficult to dismiss—the Klamath memory of the 7630-year-old eruption of Mt Mazama (Deur 2002) is one—most of these are inevitably based on sparse information from which credible arguments are difficult to construct. Most scientists hold a sceptical view of such ‘deep’ oral histories (Henige2009; Owsley and Jantz 2001), a position that is prudent, although there are some who regard it as unduly cautious (Echo-Hawk 2000) then listing much more concrete examples of how local myths can be tied to global sea level rise, for example: > Some of these stories recall that the Aboriginal name of Fitzroy Island is gabaɽor ‘lower arm’ of a former main-land promontory that became partly submerged. Another recalls the name of a place halfway between Fitzroy Island and King Beach that is now submerged; its name was Mudaga (the Indindji word for the pencil pine, Athrotaxis cupressoides) after the trees growing there along with an explanation for why these stories might have persisted: > the only plausible explanation for the Indindji people of coastal Queensland continuing to tell the story of Mudaga ... for thousands of years after it was no longer visible, is if that story were part of an explicitly taught package of stories inherited through land-owning Indindji patrilines. For the existence of Mudaga, even submerged, constitutes evidence of knowing one’s country, and thus establishing one’s relationship with that country. Without such ritualised framing, the transmission of such stories across perhaps over 100 generations would seem to be implausibly vulnerable to chance link-breaking The connection between the Gilgamesh floods and global sea-level rise, or the Black Sea, etc., has no comparable evidence.

layer8 5y ago

Maybe it could be explained by each new generation asking their parents why nobody is dwelling near the coast. Meaning, the information is passed down because it is necessary to explain the current situation. The passed-down explanation may even mutate significantly, as long as it still keeps people away from the coast.

hemreldop 5y ago

Pretty sure all the Vedas were passed down for millennia as word of mouth. The aborigines seem to have stories of floods from 10,000 years ago.

mark336 5y ago

Its not too unfathomable. Indigenous people are around today and they pass on lore to their youth the same way. Also looks like they use paint to make drawings. Probably recorded some of their history too.