Comment by thinkingtoilet
3 months ago
Go play a game of telephone with 20 people and see how well information travels. Now multiply that by 100 years.
3 months ago
Go play a game of telephone with 20 people and see how well information travels. Now multiply that by 100 years.
100 years doesn't require a game of telephone with 20 people. It requires maybe 2 or 3. And for a event known to a whole town, you have multiple independent narrators which can help stabilize information.
My family has far more trivial information passed down orally that is way older than 100 years.
Mine doesn't. I know just a handful of things about my great grandparents. Things I do know about my family history didn't come from oral traditions but rather records placing my ancestors in places.
Even from what I know of my parents, I'm sure I've forgotten or misremembered a bunch of stories that they've told me about their lives. I couldn't reliably retell more than a handful of stories.
Life in the last century or so has become far less conducive to oral history with travel and entertainment. It's much easier to maintain an oral history when live storytelling & music are practically the only form of entertainment and your extended family has lived in the same place for many generations. Still it's not that uncommon even today. I don't know much about my mothers family but I grew up hearing occasional stories and genealogy about the famous ancestor on my fathers side despite the fact that he died over a century ago on another continent. And boy oh boy did we get an education when we went back to visit the old family farm...found out I was related to him at least 2 different ways, as well as half the people on that stretch of road and the hotel owner in town. It seemed like there wasn't a person in town who couldn't tell you their connection to the only really significant person/even in the towns history.
If that game of telephone includes the sentence "I'm going to kidnap your child", I'll bet it travels faster and more accurately than you think it will.
Ask an Australian aborigine to sing you one of their 20,000 year old songs.
Humans have a context problem. We all insist ours is the best culture; whereas, all culture is a lie which only persists in the retelling.
In that sense, we Westerners have a long, long way to go to catch up with the aborigines.
That calculation doesn't make sense.
Except oral histories seemed to have been very important to people and passing them down accurately has been noted throughout history
No TV, no books. Lightly populated rural communities, without a lot of visitors.
People loved stories because they were bored.
It's not boredom. Humans have always told stories and we still tell them today. How often does the 500 mile email come up on HN, or The Story of Mel? What about the SR-71 speed check? It's an innate human characteristic to love stories and most social media is lightly disguised storytelling.
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The telephone game lacks features in the telling that are common in oral storytelling that help reinforce the content and reduces the number of errors. Repeated telling, repetition in the structure, rhyming and alliteration (which is used, or even if they're used, depends on the language), being made into a song (seems to stick better than just straight speaking), etc. If you played the telephone game with a deliberately constructed story using those elements and taught that story to the next "generation" by repetition over a period of time before they, in turn, repeated it to the next generation it would be much more reliable. It also wouldn't be the telephone game.
I'm convinced that poems are an effective error-correcting code for remembering things.