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Originally Posted by Plett25
I think they could. And if they thought it was important enough, they would.
There are oral histories from Vancouver Island about an enormous earthquake that killed thousands. That earthquake has been dated by sediment samples and linked to written records of an orphan tsunami in Japan in 1700.
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The problem I pointed to was not just produced by the absence of a literate culture, it was greatly exacerbated by the general quality of life in the neolithic and early bronze age. There is still a social, cultural gulf that separates the second millennium native Americans from prehistoric man.
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Originally Posted by Plett25
Written records aren't and weren't the only way of preserving history. And while life in the bronze age was probably nasty, brutal and short, they still told stories and sang songs around the fire. And art, in the form of cave paintings or tapestries, or relics can be used to anchor the collective memory.
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Honestly, we have no idea what sorts of things pre-historic families and tribes regaled to one another in stories and songs. And the very few surviving bits of art from the period does not reflect anything like what you imagine. More like what I have said earlier, people's concerns and interest—as far as we can tell from archaeological and anthropological studies—were with day to day life. There is no evidence for the preservation of cultural memories from the distant past.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Plett25
It is hard for us to imagine re-telling stories for thousands of years. IMO that is because the world has probably changed more in the last 100 or 200 years than it did in the previous 5,000. But when you're a son of a goat herder living in a mud hut, you listen to your grandfather's songs about the goat herder who lived in a mud hut not far from here... well, that's a lot easier to imagine than getting a kid to put down his iPod or get off the trampoline and listen to grandpa tell you a story about the goat herder who lived in a mud hut on the other side of the planet.
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I think you greatly underestimate the time period in question here: the argument has been forwarded that the Black Sea flood from c. 5600 B.C.E. produce deeply engrained cultural memories that persisted and developed for over 3000 years before they were written down some time in the second millennium B.C.E. One of my biggest problems with the argument is the enormous time gap between the event and its first known recollection. Less than 3000 years separates us now from the time of Homer.
Even in early, highly sophisticated societies from much much later in antiquity, we find that people's connection to and recollection of past, "watershed" events from only a few hundred years ago were extremely fragile. A good illustration of this is in the comparison of the scant reliable historical records that document the resettlement of Jerusalem around 500 B.C.E. and the archaeological evidence itself. Memories about the exile and return of Jews to Judaea from even 300 or 400 years after the event are contradictory and loaded with all sorts of embellishments, but more importantly, they universally reflect contemporary concerns, and show little interest in the event itself. The point being, that while it may be theoretically possible for a cultural memory to survive in the total absence of a literary culture for over 30 centuries, it does seem to be extremely unlikely. At minimum, it would be unprecedented, because there is NO EVIDENCE for the preservation of traditions under those conditions, and for that length of time.
I will repeat again: It is much more likely that the ANE flood myths developed from contemporary historical events, and not from something that happened in the very distant past. There were still major floods in the early bronze age that were significant enough for people to reflect soberly on their own mortality, and—more importantly—upon the tenuousness of their own civilisations.