Historians have discovered that some Australian and Tasmanian aboriginal oral traditions accurately conveyed real-world knowledge dating back to the end of the last ice-age.

Australian aboriginals have transmitted the history of how Australia’s ancient coast was inundated by rising sea levels going back 7000 years!

And a Tasmanian aboriginal group has transmitted the history of how their ancient coast was inundated going back to almost 12,000 years ago – and they even have an accurate oral tradition about the position of some stars going back to that era!

Perhaps more shockingly, historians working together with astronomers have revealed that some Australian tribes share knowledge of the constellation Orion that they seemingly couldn’t possibly know – unless they had passed down a story from their most-distant ancestors – from a time before Europeans, Africans, Asians, Indonesians, Native Americans and Aboriginal Australians had even split apart.

In other words, we have some tantalizing evidence of a story about the constellation of Orion from 100,000 years ago that became a shared feature of human civilization – the world’s oldest story?

Indigenous peoples transmitting stories with accurate geological information for thousands of years

Aboriginal society has preserved memories of Australia’s coastline dating back more than 7,000 years. That’s the conclusion that University of the Sunshine Coast Professor of Geography Patrick Nunn reached in a ground-breaking paper published today in renowned academic journal, Australian Geographer.

Professor Nunn and collaborator Nick Reid, a University of New England linguist, had their research paper accepted into the journal after three years of painstaking research. The article describes the pair’s study of Aboriginal stories from 21 places around Australia’s coastline, each describing a time when sea levels were significantly lower than today.

Professor Nunn said present sea levels in Australia were reached 7,000 years ago and as such any stories about the coastline stretching much further out to sea had to pre-date that time. “These stories talk about a time when the sea started to come in and cover the land, and the changes this brought about to the way people lived – the changes in landscape, the ecosystem and the disruption this caused to their society,” he said.

“It’s important to note that it’s not just one story that describes this process. There are many stories, all consistent in their narrative, across 21 diverse sites around Australia’s coastline.” In recognition of the importance of the research, Australian Geographer editors chose to publish the paper unabridged, despite it being nearly three times the length of the journal’s normal articles. The extensively reviewed paper is expected to attract plenty of debate and discussion from the academic community.

Professor Nunn said his interest in how stories met science was piqued during his extensive tenure at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji. He said the time span of the memories in the Australian Aboriginal stories he studied, however, appeared unmatched by any other culture. “Anything that goes back thousands of years – nearly 10,000 years in some cases – has to be quite exceptional,” he said. “It’s a remarkable time period when we consider our own memories and what we can remember even with the aid of books and other information. “I believe these stories endured that long partly due to the harshness of Australia’s natural environment, which meant that each generation had to pass on knowledge to the next in a systematic way to ensure its survival.”

Nunn, P. D., & Reid, N. J. (2015). Aboriginal Memories of Inundation of the Australian Coast Dating from More than 7000 Years Ago. Australian Geographer, 47(1), 11–47. https://doi.org/10.1080/00049182.2015.1077539

Revealed: how Indigenous Australian storytelling accurately records sea level rises 7,000 years ago

Indigenous stories of dramatic sea level rises across Australia date back more than 7,000 years in a continuous oral tradition without parallel anywhere in the world, according to new research. Sunshine Coast University marine geographer Patrick Nunn and University of New England linguist Nicholas Reid believe that 21 Indigenous stories from across the continent faithfully record events between 18,000 and 7000 years ago, when the sea rose 120m.

Reid said a key feature of Indigenous storytelling culture – a distinctive “cross-generational cross-checking” process – might explain the remarkable consistency in accounts passed down by preliterate people which researchers previously believed could not persist for more than 800 years.

“The idea that 300 generations could faithfully tell a story that didn’t degenerate into Chinese whispers, that was passing on factual information that we know happened from independent chronology, that just seems too good to be true, right?” Reid told Guardian Australia.

“It’s an extraordinary thing. We don’t find this in other places around the world. The sea being 120 metres lower and then coming up over the continental shelf, that happened in Africa, America, Asia and everywhere else. But it’s only in Australia that we’re finding this large canon of stories that are all faithfully telling the same thing.”

Scholars of oral traditions have previously been sceptical of how accurately they reflect real events.

However, Nunn and Reid’s paper, “Aboriginal memories of inundation of the Australian coast dating from more than 7000 years ago”, published in Australian Geographer, argues the stories provide empirical corroboration of a postglacial sea level rise documented by marine geographers.

Some of the stories are straight factual accounts, such as those around Port Phillip Bay near Melbourne, which tell of the loss of kangaroo hunting grounds.

Others, especially older stories such as those from around Spencer Gulf in South Australia, are allegorical: an ancestral being angered by the misbehaviour of a clan punishes them by taking their country, gouging a groove with a magical kangaroo bone for the sea to swallow up the land.

“Our sense originally is that the sea level must have been creeping up very slowly and not been noticeable in an individual’s lifetime,” Reid said.

Joshua Robertson, Wed 16 Sep 2015, The Guardian

Figure 1. Map of Australia showing the 21 coastal locations from which Aboriginal stories about coastal inundation are described in this paper. Also shown is the extent of the continental shelf that was exposed during the low sea-level stage of the Last Glacial Maximum, about 20 000 years ago.

And

Archaeological evidence of an ethnographically documented Australian Aboriginal ritual dated to the last ice age

David, B., Mullett, R., Wright, N. et al. Nature Human Behaviour, 7/1/2924

Also

Tasmanian Aboriginal oral traditions among the oldest recorded narratives in the world

New research published in the Journal of Archaeological Science indicates Palawa (Tasmanian Aboriginal) stories recall geological and astronomical events that occurred 12,000 years ago, placing them among the oldest recorded oral traditions in the world.

University of Tasmania researchers were part of a trans-disciplinary team that investigated Palawa oral traditions recorded in the 1830s, which described rising seas flooding the Bassian Land Bridge connecting Tasmania to mainland Australia, and the presence of the bright star Canopus near the South Celestial Pole.

[And next is a close-up map from the paper:]

Fig. 1. Topographic map of the Bass Strait. Map shows the conditions before the Bassian Land Bridge was submerged. The yellow shaded area represents geography of the land bridge, while the broken red line indicated the last vestige of a continuous Bassian Land Bridge between Tasmania and the mainland.

The method of calculating approximate ages is shown in the inset. (For interpretation of the references to colour in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the Web version of this article.)

By drawing on topographic data of the seafloor and calculating the position of Canopus in the ancient past due to axial precession, the team estimated that both conditions date back to at least 11,960 years ago.

Astronomer and lead author, Associate Professor Duane Hamacher from the University of Melbourne, said using a scientifically datable natural event – such as a volcanic eruption or meteorite impact – enables researchers to show the integrity of oral traditions can be maintained for thousands of years.

“Current archaeological evidence indicates that humans reached Tasmania at least 40,000 years ago,” Associate Professor Hamacher said. Palawa cultural historian, Pro Vice-Chancellor Aboriginal Leadership and co-author, Professor Greg Lehman from the University of Tasmania, emphasised that scientific validation of oral traditions reinforces, rather than supersedes, the cultural authority of Indigenous knowledge.

“Scientific investigation of colonial records that articulate traditional systems of knowledge preservation creates a wonderful multi-disciplinary and cross-cultural way of making our history and our landscape more meaningful in our lives,” Professor Lehman said.

“Physicists and astronomers sometimes struggle to do this alone. This project has profoundly deepened our relationship with history and science by taking Aboriginal traditions seriously.”

Geographer and co-author, Professor Patrick Nunn from the University of the Sunshine Coast, said there were on-going debates about the length of time oral traditions can be passed down while still maintaining vitality.

“Aboriginal Australians developed complex knowledge systems that were committed to memory and passed down through generations via oral traditions,” Professor Nunn said.

“Our research suggests that Palawa oral traditions accurately recall the flooding of the land bridge between Tasmania and the mainland – showing that oral traditions can be passed down more than 400 successive generations while maintaining historical accuracy.”

Historian and co-author, Associate Professor Rebe Taylor from the University of Tasmania, stressed the significance of recognising the endurance of Palawa oral traditions.

“They endured not only millennia, but also the genocide committed by the British in the nineteenth century and the wrongful representation of the Palawa as a so-called ‘extinct race’,” Associate Professor Taylor said.

The team also included Michelle Gantevoort from RMIT University, Ka Hei Andrew Law from the University of Melbourne, and Mel Miles from Swinburne University of Technology.

Duane Hamacher, Patrick Nunn, Michelle Gantevoort, Rebe Taylor, Greg Lehman, Ka Hei Andrew Law, Mel Miles, The archaeology of orality: Dating Tasmanian Aboriginal oral traditions to the Late Pleistocene, Journal of Archaeological Science, Volume 159, 2023, ISSN 0305-4403, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2023.105819.

The world’s oldest story? Astronomers say global myths about ‘seven sisters’ stars may reach back 100,000 years

In a nothing less than shocking article on The Conversation, Ray Norris writes

In the northern sky in December is a beautiful cluster of stars known as the Pleiades, or the “seven sisters”. Look carefully and you will probably count six stars. So why do we say there are seven of them?

Many cultures around the world refer to the Pleiades as “seven sisters”, and also tell quite similar stories about them. After studying the motion of the stars very closely, we believe these stories may date back 100,000 years to a time when the constellation looked quite different.

In Greek mythology, the Pleiades were the seven daughters of the Titan Atlas. He was forced to hold up the sky for eternity, and was therefore unable to protect his daughters. To save the sisters from being raped by the hunter Orion, Zeus transformed them into stars. But the story says one sister fell in love with a mortal and went into hiding, which is why we only see six stars.

A similar story is found among Aboriginal groups across Australia. In many Australian Aboriginal cultures, the Pleiades are a group of young girls, and are often associated with sacred women’s ceremonies and stories. The Pleiades are also important as an element of Aboriginal calendars and astronomy, and for several groups their first rising at dawn marks the start of winter.

Close to the Seven Sisters in the sky is the constellation of Orion, which is often called “the saucepan” in Australia. In Greek mythology Orion is a hunter. This constellation is also often a hunter in Aboriginal cultures, or a group of lusty young men.

The writer and anthropologist Daisy Bates reported people in central Australia regarded Orion as a “hunter of women”, and specifically of the women in the Pleiades. Many Aboriginal stories say the boys, or man, in Orion are chasing the seven sisters – and one of the sisters has died, or is hiding, or is too young, or has been abducted, so again only six are visible.

The Lost Sister

Similar “lost Pleiad” stories are found in European, African, Asian, Indonesian, Native American and Aboriginal Australian cultures. Many cultures regard the cluster as having seven stars, but acknowledge only six are normally visible, and then have a story to explain why the seventh is invisible.

How come the Australian Aboriginal stories are so similar to the Greek ones? Anthropologists used to think Europeans might have brought the Greek story to Australia, where it was adapted by Aboriginal people for their own purposes. But the Aboriginal stories seem to be much, much older than European contact. And there was little contact between most Australian Aboriginal cultures and the rest of the world for at least 50,000 years. So why do they share the same stories?

Barnaby Norris and I suggest an answer in a paper to be published by Springer early next year in a book titled Advancing Cultural Astronomy, a preprint for which is available here.

All modern humans are descended from people who lived in Africa before they began their long migrations to the far corners of the globe about 100,000 years ago. Could these stories of the seven sisters be so old? Did all humans carry these stories with them as they travelled to Australia, Europe, and Asia?

Moving Stars

Careful measurements with the Gaia space telescope and others show the stars of the Pleiades are slowly moving in the sky. One star, Pleione, is now so close to the star Atlas they look like a single star to the naked eye.

But if we take what we know about the movement of the stars and rewind 100,000 years, Pleione was further from Atlas and would have been easily visible to the naked eye. So 100,000 years ago, most people really would have seen seven stars in the cluster.

We believe this movement of the stars can help to explain two puzzles: the similarity of Greek and Aboriginal stories about these stars, and the fact so many cultures call the cluster “seven sisters” even though we only see six stars today.

Is it possible the stories of the Seven Sisters and Orion are so old our ancestors were telling these stories to each other around campfires in Africa, 100,000 years ago? Could this be the oldest story in the world?

The world’s oldest story? Astronomers say global myths about ‘seven sisters’ stars may reach back 100,000 years, Ray Norris, The Conversation, 12/21/2020

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