My point is that the Happy Birthday song is an oral tradition which has lasted more than 100 years. That seems corroborated by the 1924 date you cited. That's a

My point is that the Happy Birthday song is an oral tradition which has lasted more than 100 years. That seems corroborated by the 1924 date you cited. That's all. Of course I don't think oral traditions go unchanged for 12,000 years. Some very old oral traditions, like the ones from ancient India, stayed relatively unchanged only because their emphasis shifted suddenly and dramatically from active composition to ritual performance, to the extent that most people had no idea what the actual language used meant. Their opacity became a feature, not a bug. However, despite the details changing, consistent storylines and story fragments exist across many ancient cultures, sometimes because they are derived from the same narrative source, and other times because of shared experiences across divergent cultures.