10,000-Year-Old Story of Rising Seas

The last ice age feels like a prehistoric epoch that precedes humanity in the minds of modern people. However, it is very interesting that we can still trace it accurately with the oral tradition of some peoples. The best example and the one we will examine in this article is the oral tradition about sea rise of the Aboriginal Australians. Don't forget that we are talking about thousands of years, way before the invention of writing. Now let's dive into this ancient cultural memory without further ado.

Living in a harsh environment, Aboriginal people dutifully passed their experiences, life lessons and knowledge to future generations. They also passed the information about the post-glacial shoreline of the land we now call Australia, giving us the accurate results with modern science. This oral tradition preserved so well that their grandchildren still able to point to islands that no longer exist.

On the map above, you can see the 21 different places around the coastline of land. These places were pointed by Aboriginal peoples' oral tradition and they described a time when sea levels were remarkably lower than they are today, approximately 7,000 years ago. It is important to note that all of these stories have a consistent narrative and come from different places of the continent and some of them have been told for 10,000 years, which means they have transmitted the stories for 400 generations.

Moral of the article is, well, not everything is written in the books for you to read. Sometimes we need to seek, and sometimes we need to listen. The collective memory of humanity is way older than writing, but we have managed to keep them alive for younger generations, which is truly impressive.