There are a few examples of oral cultures ensuring perfect transmission across a large expanse of time.
One example is the several different recitation styles used to memorize Sanskrit verses. These methods give memorizers multiple ways to remember a line, and also prevent errors like the inadvertent mixing of adjacent words (" euphonic combination"). The "checksumming schemes" are far more elaborate than you'd imagine. [1] The result is perfect transmission of text and its pronunciation, including pitch accent.
Another example is a "multi-party verification" scheme in some Aboriginal Australian cultures. "... storytelling among contemporary Aboriginal people can involve the deliberate tracking of teaching responsibilities. For example, a man teaches the stories of his country to his children. His son has his knowledge of those stories judged by his sister’s children—for certain kin are explicitly tasked with ensuring that those stories are learned and recounted properly—and people take those responsibilities seriously. ... the 'owner-manager' relationship, requiring a story to be discussed explicitly across three generations of a patriline, constitutes a cross-generational mechanism which may be particularly successful at maximising precision in replication of a story across successive generations". [2]
I think the harsh conditions in Australia, where there a thousand ways to die, put the onus on truth and preservation of it in the oral tradition. Unlike most other cultures where it's kind of ok to gradually deviate from the truth. It is worth paying attention to the aborigine stories.They have also made astronomical observations that are pretty accurate to the date. https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/australias-indigenous-peopl...
Singing/Ballads are also popular way of preserving information fidelity. Homer's works were based on ballads. We don't put premium on memory now, but before the invention of printing press, memory techniques were widely studied and used.
It kind of feels like a local optima situation where they relied on memory so much that they didn't feel the need for writing. Either that or the fact that there was no writing for so long resulted in them specialising in memory techniques a lot.
I've also heard it about the Buddhist tradition, that at least three groups of monks would memorize parts of the canon, and they would preiodically come together to chant it. If one group differed from the other two, they would know that's an error (at least to fairly high probability). This seems to have been an accurate method of transmission since independently written-down versions separated by centuries of oral tradition in Gandhara and Sri Lanka are very similar.
There are worse schemes, but that is barely comparable to Vedic chanting.
3-pick-2 as a method is quite good but also quite vulnerable to a bunch of transmission errors beyond simple memory issues. Over long periods of time there is a higher risk of group think or status plays leading to wild changes.
Of course the vedas aren't immune, but it is a lot more effort to get them wrong than just a few people thinking "we want to change the story". A group would have to be hugely motivated to successfully change the chant.
In India, there is a custom of passing ancient knowledge through poetic verses. Every poetic verses is sung in a specific 'meter'. If there is a discrepancy in recitation then remembering and passing knowledge 'letter by letter' can not succeed.
Many of the verses are thousands of years old.
I read some describing an ancient extinct river ~7000 years ago, later rediscovered through satellite imagery (don't know the right term).
That’s clever and all, but how can you actually be sure the message was completely unchanged over 7000 years without an original written record? I get that special recitation tricks can make it harder to mess up, but I don’t think you can definitively say the information never once changed.
Because it was taught that the accents contain the meaning beyond the linguistic meanings of the words. It was sacred and you're not allowed to mispronounce it.
7000 is a bold estimate. But they remained intact for 3000 years in the face of significant religious changes.
Today modern Hindu hardly knows whats there in the Vedas, and religious customs are significantly different. But these verses are letter-to-letter same across India.
The people who follow this tradition of oral recitation where trained from childhood in a special school (kind of boarding) where certain values facilitating the lossless transfer of meaning like truthfulness, honesty etc, were imbibed deep into students. It was strictly not allowed to edit (add or subtract) the original verses( if one does so he/she can write another book).
After certain years has passed by, only those who were capable enough and 'morally' qualified were authorised to become teachers and pass on the knowledge.
Even today in some places in India(not so rampant as in like 100 years ago) the same culture is followed.
An example of this may be the healing spells found in the Merseburg charms, which probably came from a common Indo-European origin somewhere in the Eurasian steppes.
Yeah, in language that suits HN, formal poetic structure amounts to error correction in oral tradition.
It dramatically narrows the possibilities of what idea or word or sound or whatever could fit in any particular place in the verse, making it easier to memorize and accurately recite. Clever (and some blundering) poets and changes in language still set up these recitations to evolve away from whatever they originally were, but the original seeds linger a long, long time.
Poetic structure is such a strong framework that linguists have been able to recover information about the dialect and pronunciation of English in the time of Shakespeare, from Shakespearean works.
However I think parables are an even better checksum, as they can be translated also, but if the meaning is altered the story fails to be coherent. Parables are imo, the best form of information transference across time, imo.
The river itself dried in around ~5000BC.
The text attributed itself as being authored in 3000BC.
The idea that text was written in 1500BC (3500 years ago) was proposed by Max Muller which was contested by his contemporary western and Indian scholars alike ( they proposed earlier dates)
In his late life, Max himself admitted that the dates he gave were hypothetical, they were to considered minimum and it could actually be more than that.
It occurred to me recently that tig/tag has probably been passed down through oral tradition from child to child for millennia. It's possible that it's older than homo-sapiens, older than the taming of fire. Millions of years of tradition.
And it still being passed on orally, child-to-child.
Not quite as old but another example of an enduring child-to-child cultural transmission is the daring right of passage that is Chappy/Knicky-Knocky Nine Doors/Ding dong ditch[0].
I guess it's the game of tag ("tag, you're it!"). In Dutch it is called tikkertje ("tikkie, je bent 'm!"); as Old English and Old Dutch were very similar, this may explain the -i- in tig, or at least it made it easier for me to recognize the word. :-)
Growing up in a Hindu household, a lot of our festivals involve listening to origin stories of the customs. A lot of those have of course been glorified to add an element of holiness, but it's possible they are actually derived from some small incident happened in the past.
Like a butterfly effect, a small insignificant event leading to a major celebration for billion people continued over centuries
Yup. The Epic of Gilgamesh (c. 18th century BC) caused quite a lot of controversy when it was translated in 1870 due to its striking similarity to many parts of the Hebrew Bible (which was written MUCH later).
Similar controversies erupted over the stories of Osiris (c. 25th century BC).
By the 10th century BC, almost all of the story themes that we ascribe to more modern authorship had already been written.
> "Australia kept the memory of its first peoples alive thanks to a powerful oral tradition that enabled it to be passed on," Delannoy said.
> "However in our societies, memory has changed since we switched to the written word, and we have lost this sense."
I sort of think that this is a "what's water?" thing, because a lot of our ancient prehistorical traditions and practices that continued into the historical era and beyond are so embedded with how we see how ourselves and act and behave that it's impossible for us to even notice them. There's a lot that we have looked at in ancient sites and have just known what the purpose was for because we still do the same thing now, or at least we had recorded uses for it from historical texts, it's just said to be "obvious" and not really worth commenting about how interesting it is that we preserved these oral traditions.
There's a kind of exoticism/noble savage thing going on here, I think.
Yeah. I can think of one ritual that's probably even older: burying the dead.
However what interesting about this tradition is the degree of specificity that was preserved with this ritual (e.g. stick of same type of wood, coated with fat, put in a small fire to break), none of which has any real practical purpose.
Its impossible to tell, but the sense of passage of time must have been dramatically different in earlier periods of human development.
Persistent rituals passed on from elders to youngsters, oral transmission of huge poems and other such "low tech" information tools must have given some structure to what otherwise might have felt as an eternal reboot.
I read somewhere (don't recall exactly where) that your sense of the passage of time is directly related to how much things change because that impacts how many memories you form. Essentially, when every day is the same, not many new memories are created, so you don't notice time passing (New Years was just a few weeks ago, how can it be July already!), but when things are constantly changing, time passes much more slowly. When you're a child and non-stop learning and exploring, 3 months seems like an eternity.
I wonder if technology development has a similar effect. When the world essentially remains unchanged for your entire life, things must seem much faster with days blending together.
Having been to jail, here's what they say, "the days pass like years, and the years pass like days." Which is a hugely accurate interpretation of what happens. Nothing happens all day, and every day is the same, so the days drag on in the most mind-numbingly tedious fashion. But then you wake up and you notice six months have passed without you being able to name a single thing that happened.
Herzog talks about this a bit in his cave-painting movie[0]. It's fascinating to think that for thousands of years, our ancestors lived without any significant change to their world. I like to imagine that they were pretty happy with that (subject to the normal animal stresses of survival) -- but as you say, it's impossible to tell.
The persistency that you're describing is key. I'd like to think that previous generations were far more content with time and what is associated with it. The mundane of the day-by-day, aging, death, etc.
Very cool :-). I don't know that much about the natives of Australia and their history, I wonder how many of these oral traditions have been written down. An immediate google gave me this document, seems interesting at a glance: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/159354575.pdf
When I lived on the west coast a native friend of mine spoke of how some elders no longer wanted stories to be written down. They have seen how their oral stories get documented, effectively transforming them from a living secret into a fixed text in a dead book. The book then goes on a shelf, fodder for the endless stream of anthropology classes taught ay universities in distant cities. More people read the story in the book than ever come to listen to the story in person.
After a few decades of this pattern, young anthologists are now hearing stories and asking questions about why the story today is possibly slightly different than what was written down a decade prior. There is an old stereotype of western Indians believing that cameras could capture one's soul. That is something to think about when we "document" an oral tradition.
I come from a background with a strong folk singing tradition, and this reminds me of the two camps of folk singers within it: the purists who want to preserve the "original" tempo, lyrics, melody as it was recorded and documented a century ago and who frown upon deviation from that, and the modernists who adapt, improvise and reinterpret folk songs as they see fit.
Interesting. I do like the documentation for immortality but with stories there is an obsession with "the actual" or "the original" and many people equate legibility with originality. "Source? The original documented here is blah blah".
Sampling a continuous process once and describing it as the process.
I live near the Navajo Nation, but claim no true understanding of native american culture. Here's what I've heard about their attitudes toward e.g. video recording their rituals:
They welcome you, or any respectful individual, to participate and to "live their rituals" with them. The local college even hosts such events, to help the neighboring communities understand each other better. Any elders will likely tell you many stories, once they see you're actually interested and not just in it for a cheap tourist thrill[1].
They discourage trying to record or explain it to people who did not participate. They consider the first-hand experience to be transformative, and that you fundamentally cannot understand them without it.
[1]: I understand there are some things they're not supposed to mention much, roughly in the sense of "speak of the Devil" in Christian societies, or naming Bloody Mary three times. Those stories you might only hear on special occasions.
I’m surprised by how tenuous the link is between the cave find and the archival find. Is the bar really that low for claims in archaeological papers or am I missing something? It’s a compelling story, but surely Occam’s razor would conclude that poking sticks into dead animals and fire pits is just what people have done for thousands of years? Where’s the evidence that there was chanting and a healing ceremony?
Edit: full paper is freely available on Nature here:
"Each one was found in a separate fireplace around the size of the palm of a hand—far too small to have been used for heat or cooking meat.
The slightly charred ends of the sticks had been cut specially to stick into the fire, and both were coated in human or animal fat."
That's rather more than circumstantial evidence. Granted the ritual might have changed a bit over 12,000 odd years but where else have you seen people poke sticks into tiny hearth's?
It’s all circumstantial evidence because that’s all we get.
Circumstantial evidence is not “weak evidence”, it is evidence concerning the circumstances.
For instance, DNA is circumstantial evidence. It’s evidence that can imply a connection between events, but it is not proof of such a connection. Fingerprints: circumstantial. Call logs: often circumstantial.
The opposite of circumstantial evidence is direct evidence. Direct evidence is rarer and often not as useful. Direct evidence would be an actual witness to the event. To call back to prior examples:
Fingerprints are direct evidence someone touched something. But they are circumstantial evidence they then used that object in commission of a crime.
Here, the direct evidence is that things were burned and sticks were sharpened. The circumstances in which they were found implies the rest.
If they had been doing the ritual regularly enough to preserve it for over 12,000 years in a relatively small range, it seems surprising that the excavations didn't turn up way more instances than it did. They can find 2 perfect instances within centuries of each other 12kya in the same excavation, then it just teleports without a trace to the 1880s?
This sounds more like a birthday paradox. There are so many rituals and superstitions in indigenous peoples over the millennia that it would be shocking if you could never find cases of things that looked vaguely similar when reduced to an archaeological residue and you cast a net as wide as 'anything which anyone has ever described which sounds similar no matter how many millennia'.
(I would also note that 'fat smeared on stuff and involving fires' is not nearly as rare as it might sound. Fat is important and used in many sacrifices or medicines - eg Homer, with all that fat wrapped on or stacked on top of bones in a holocaust to the gods.)
Have to agree here. Also just kind of doesn't pass the common sense test. We all learn the "game of telephone" as a kid and how information can change even just being passed once.
In fact I've heard archaeologists in the past specifically say that no oral tradition can survive intact more than 100 years. Usually this statement is in reference to certain creation myths being relatively modern inventions.
A claim of 12000 years needs strong evidence. Given what I've seen from the field lately I have a counter-theory, but I'm not really comfortable sharing.
> In fact I've heard archaeologists in the past specifically say that no oral tradition can survive intact more than 100 years. Usually this statement is in reference to certain creation myths being relatively modern inventions.
Maybe you meant 1000 years?
If you really meant 100 years, there's an obvious counterexample: The "Happy Birthday Song", published in 1893. Arguably no one learns it by reading the words and notes from a page.
Furthermore, considering that until pretty recently in history most people were illiterate, the stories they learned were transmitted to them orally (even if read from a book).
I came to post the same thing. You have a stick from 12,000 years ago, and a story from 100 years ago, and they link them because of a similarity "there is fat at the end of the stick".
You could get fat on a stick by roasting a small mouse (so a small hearth), or tons of other ways. This really isn't enough evidence, not without a ton more findings of the same thing at various dates over the timeperiod.
If tiny hearths with fat-covered sticks were common elsewhere, this would be a valid objection. But as it is, this seems to be a distinctive practice that is present at the same location separated by 12k years, and the ancient one was buried and so not observed for most of that time. What's the alternative explanation except a common root in a cultural practice?
It's actually not that far-fetched when you consider the long view of human history. Hominins have been capable of cultural transmission for millions of years, and during most of that time it made most sense to repeat what the previous generation had done as closely as possible, since they had by definition survived and reproduced well enough to make a new generation. Among all those practices of toolmaking, hunting strategies, herbal knowledge, and whatever we call 'ritual', it wouldn't have been clear to the practitioners which were actually effective at increasing survival and which not, so everything gets repreated over generations (with occasional modifications catching on and producing cultural evolution ofc)
Have you ever watched US State Department press briefings, and paid close attention to how they use language (ie: "X is linked to Y")? Or, heard the public subsequently discussing what was said in them (say, right here on HN)?
Humans are a story based species...always have been always will be. Stories are our weak spot, the ultimate attack/control vector.
Readit News
One example is the several different recitation styles used to memorize Sanskrit verses. These methods give memorizers multiple ways to remember a line, and also prevent errors like the inadvertent mixing of adjacent words (" euphonic combination"). The "checksumming schemes" are far more elaborate than you'd imagine. [1] The result is perfect transmission of text and its pronunciation, including pitch accent.
Another example is a "multi-party verification" scheme in some Aboriginal Australian cultures. "... storytelling among contemporary Aboriginal people can involve the deliberate tracking of teaching responsibilities. For example, a man teaches the stories of his country to his children. His son has his knowledge of those stories judged by his sister’s children—for certain kin are explicitly tasked with ensuring that those stories are learned and recounted properly—and people take those responsibilities seriously. ... the 'owner-manager' relationship, requiring a story to be discussed explicitly across three generations of a patriline, constitutes a cross-generational mechanism which may be particularly successful at maximising precision in replication of a story across successive generations". [2]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vedic_chant
[2]: "Aboriginal Memories of Inundation of the Australian Coast Dating from More than 7000 Years Ago", Patrick D. Nunn, https://doi.org/10.1080/00049182.2015.1077539
Singing/Ballads are also popular way of preserving information fidelity. Homer's works were based on ballads. We don't put premium on memory now, but before the invention of printing press, memory techniques were widely studied and used.
3-pick-2 as a method is quite good but also quite vulnerable to a bunch of transmission errors beyond simple memory issues. Over long periods of time there is a higher risk of group think or status plays leading to wild changes.
Of course the vedas aren't immune, but it is a lot more effort to get them wrong than just a few people thinking "we want to change the story". A group would have to be hugely motivated to successfully change the chant.
7000 is a bold estimate. But they remained intact for 3000 years in the face of significant religious changes.
Today modern Hindu hardly knows whats there in the Vedas, and religious customs are significantly different. But these verses are letter-to-letter same across India.
Some of it is described here - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vedic_chant#Oral_transmission
An example in action - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLdq15ptqUs
It dramatically narrows the possibilities of what idea or word or sound or whatever could fit in any particular place in the verse, making it easier to memorize and accurately recite. Clever (and some blundering) poets and changes in language still set up these recitations to evolve away from whatever they originally were, but the original seeds linger a long, long time.
However I think parables are an even better checksum, as they can be translated also, but if the meaning is altered the story fails to be coherent. Parables are imo, the best form of information transference across time, imo.
And it still being passed on orally, child-to-child.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knock,_knock,_ginger
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/02/15/upshot/britis...
the chain is broken..
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Growing up in a Hindu household, a lot of our festivals involve listening to origin stories of the customs. A lot of those have of course been glorified to add an element of holiness, but it's possible they are actually derived from some small incident happened in the past.
Like a butterfly effect, a small insignificant event leading to a major celebration for billion people continued over centuries
Similar controversies erupted over the stories of Osiris (c. 25th century BC).
By the 10th century BC, almost all of the story themes that we ascribe to more modern authorship had already been written.
Few hundred years later they give him a magic sword and a round table. Same idea, but with other cultures, religions, etc.
> "However in our societies, memory has changed since we switched to the written word, and we have lost this sense."
I sort of think that this is a "what's water?" thing, because a lot of our ancient prehistorical traditions and practices that continued into the historical era and beyond are so embedded with how we see how ourselves and act and behave that it's impossible for us to even notice them. There's a lot that we have looked at in ancient sites and have just known what the purpose was for because we still do the same thing now, or at least we had recorded uses for it from historical texts, it's just said to be "obvious" and not really worth commenting about how interesting it is that we preserved these oral traditions.
There's a kind of exoticism/noble savage thing going on here, I think.
However what interesting about this tradition is the degree of specificity that was preserved with this ritual (e.g. stick of same type of wood, coated with fat, put in a small fire to break), none of which has any real practical purpose.
Persistent rituals passed on from elders to youngsters, oral transmission of huge poems and other such "low tech" information tools must have given some structure to what otherwise might have felt as an eternal reboot.
I wonder if technology development has a similar effect. When the world essentially remains unchanged for your entire life, things must seem much faster with days blending together.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_of_Forgotten_Dreams
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmMUlNeLApU
Sampling a continuous process once and describing it as the process.
"The original value of sin(t) is sqrt(3)/2."
They welcome you, or any respectful individual, to participate and to "live their rituals" with them. The local college even hosts such events, to help the neighboring communities understand each other better. Any elders will likely tell you many stories, once they see you're actually interested and not just in it for a cheap tourist thrill[1].
They discourage trying to record or explain it to people who did not participate. They consider the first-hand experience to be transformative, and that you fundamentally cannot understand them without it.
[1]: I understand there are some things they're not supposed to mention much, roughly in the sense of "speak of the Devil" in Christian societies, or naming Bloody Mary three times. Those stories you might only hear on special occasions.
Edit: full paper is freely available on Nature here:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-024-01912-w
The slightly charred ends of the sticks had been cut specially to stick into the fire, and both were coated in human or animal fat."
That's rather more than circumstantial evidence. Granted the ritual might have changed a bit over 12,000 odd years but where else have you seen people poke sticks into tiny hearth's?
Circumstantial evidence is not “weak evidence”, it is evidence concerning the circumstances.
For instance, DNA is circumstantial evidence. It’s evidence that can imply a connection between events, but it is not proof of such a connection. Fingerprints: circumstantial. Call logs: often circumstantial.
The opposite of circumstantial evidence is direct evidence. Direct evidence is rarer and often not as useful. Direct evidence would be an actual witness to the event. To call back to prior examples:
Fingerprints are direct evidence someone touched something. But they are circumstantial evidence they then used that object in commission of a crime.
Here, the direct evidence is that things were burned and sticks were sharpened. The circumstances in which they were found implies the rest.
This sounds more like a birthday paradox. There are so many rituals and superstitions in indigenous peoples over the millennia that it would be shocking if you could never find cases of things that looked vaguely similar when reduced to an archaeological residue and you cast a net as wide as 'anything which anyone has ever described which sounds similar no matter how many millennia'.
(I would also note that 'fat smeared on stuff and involving fires' is not nearly as rare as it might sound. Fat is important and used in many sacrifices or medicines - eg Homer, with all that fat wrapped on or stacked on top of bones in a holocaust to the gods.)
In fact I've heard archaeologists in the past specifically say that no oral tradition can survive intact more than 100 years. Usually this statement is in reference to certain creation myths being relatively modern inventions.
A claim of 12000 years needs strong evidence. Given what I've seen from the field lately I have a counter-theory, but I'm not really comfortable sharing.
Maybe you meant 1000 years?
If you really meant 100 years, there's an obvious counterexample: The "Happy Birthday Song", published in 1893. Arguably no one learns it by reading the words and notes from a page.
Furthermore, considering that until pretty recently in history most people were illiterate, the stories they learned were transmitted to them orally (even if read from a book).
You could get fat on a stick by roasting a small mouse (so a small hearth), or tons of other ways. This really isn't enough evidence, not without a ton more findings of the same thing at various dates over the timeperiod.
Humans are a story based species...always have been always will be. Stories are our weak spot, the ultimate attack/control vector.
Stories (and LLM 'story models') can be fine tuned and A/B tested against humans with live neural monitoring to evaluate narrative effectiveness.
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