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Is oral history more durable than written history?

Australian Indigenous cultures orally preserve history from thousands of years before the written record — and new research backs them up.

Though written records reach back only a few millennia, there is good reason to believe many Australian Indigenous cultures have oral traditions that preserve memories of lands that vanished beneath the sea as much as 12,000 years ago. In recent years, researchers have begun to reconstruct these vanished underwater worlds using sonar and bathymetric studies that reveal contours of drowned rivers and creeks snaking across the sea floor off Australia’s Bass Strait. “There’s a very strong emphasis upon the integrity of transmission of oral traditions in Aboriginal cultures, and all sorts of mechanisms that punish people who fail to transmit customs and dreaming stories accurately.”

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