In this series so far videos, I’ve concentred primarily on stories originating from the
Proto-Indo Europeans, as that is where a significant majority of the academic research and evidence
is available, however there are a group of stories from a place on the other side of
the world to this, that are older than these Proto-Indo European folktales. And this group
of stories represent the second oldest stories we know of, and that we can date with accuracy.
So welcome to the story behind the world’s second oldest stories, and welcome to Crecganford.
In case you haven’t watched the previous videos in this series, the age of the story
is determined by academic evidence, not “gut feel that the tribes in Africa must tell the
oldest stories”. Academic research has strong proof that the average story transmitted by
oral telling will tend to survive in its original form for no more than 500 to 800 years, and
that is because the core of the story starts becoming obscured by layers of embellishment
to sustain the interest as generations come and go. Now there are certain circumstances
that happen that will allow a story to survive longer, and in the case of the Proto-Indo
Europeans this was by the story spreading and having so many variants we could bring
them back to a single source. But there is also other criteria that will help maintain
a story, and that is when the tribes telling the stories were isolated, and also not affected
by external embellishment and narrative. If this is then coupled with traditional values
within the culture, such as values that rely on story telling for the communication of
important information, that place emphasis on the importance of the story, then you have
a stage where the stories told have no need to change. Alongside this, if the tribe telling
the story has an attachment to a location, that this location is in the story, and there
is importance in that location, then this too will ensure that any physical geographical
features within the story should also remain true, so to allow the story to accurately
reference these locations through generations. And I say this because there is one place
with a culture where the stories and the tribes meet this criterion, and that is in Australia,
with the Australian Aborigines. The Aborigines are direct descendants of a group of people
who managed to leave Africa around 70,000 years ago, and went walkabout to Australia,
a journey completed without interacting with any other humans, as most homo sapiens were
still in Africa at this time. And they managed this journey due to low sea levels, meaning
they could literally walk to Australia from Africa, via India, and South East Asia, and
they arrived at Australia around 60,000 years ago. Now they managed to pretty much walk
into Australia due to the world going through an Ice Age at the time, and this meant a huge
amount of sea water was being stored in glaciers and the ice caps. And with less water in the
sea, the sea level was lower, and the world, rather than looking like this, looked more
like this. The islands of south east asia were a single land mass and the other side
of the world Britain was part of mainland Europe. But the Ice Age peaked at 20,000 years
ago when glacial maximum, the closest towards the equator the glaciers came, and after this,
as the ice melted, sea levels rose, culminating in a final post-glacial sea rise between 8
and 10 thousand years ago which completely isolated Australia, and thus enforcing the
necessary environmental changes that helped the Aboriginal oral tradition to keep stories
in the near original form for up to 10,000 years. But this wasn’t just due to the isolation,
and we can tell this through the stories the Aborigines tell. So what are the stories?
And what do they contain that allows us to confirm their age? Well the stories come in
two types, sacred mythology and ordinary stories, and because of this the different types have
to be analysed in different ways. And what research shows is that the stories that discuss
how the landscape of Australia changed, due to this rise in sea levels, tend to be mythologies
with divine intervention enabling the event to happen, and that these changes are often
seen as punishments towards individuals or groups. Many of these stories were originally
written down at the end of the nineteenth century, by Europeans exploring the Australian
continent, and whilst there is risk of bias from these new arrivals, the notes around
some of the stories state that great care was taken not to influence what was being
said by Aborigines. So, this should increase the level of confidence we can have that most
of these stories were noted down accurately. Researchers examined these stories and found
21 that mention events to do with the sea and changes to the coastline. And whilst these
stories changed between regions of Australia, the underlying message was the same, that
events happened with the sea that affected the landscape, and this became a core part
of these 21 stories. This image shows where the stories were collected from, and how the
coastline of Australia has shrunk due to rising sea levels from the glacial melt, in effect
losing almost a quarter of its landmass in 20,000 years. So, lets look at some of these
stories to see what they say, and what evidence they can provide to show their age. The first
story is about the location known as Spencer Gulf, and is told by the Narrangga tribe who
live on Yorke Peninsula. They have a story about when Spencer Gulf was a dry land, a
marshy country reaching into the interior of Australia, and another story from this
location says that that this part of the world was filled with fresh water lagoons, each
home to different types of birds, whilst the open country in between was occupied by emus,
curlews and mallee fowls. But then both stories describe an initial flooding of the gulf,
but not a slow or gradual flooding, but as having been catastrophic event. The reason
given in the stories was because of a mythical giant kangaroo using a magic bone to cut a
trench, allowing the sea to break through, and for water to come tumbling and rolling
into the track that was dug out. And as the water flowed it filled the lagoons and the
marshes completely disappeared. Looking at this map, we can tell that for this to have
happened at the lip of the gulf, then the sea level would have had to have been 50 meters
or 164 feet lower than today, although if the story occurs across the line marked AB,
the sea would have had to have been 22 meters or 72 feet below today’s sea level. There
has been analysis of sediments between Port Pirie and Whyalla, and that confirmed that
there was rapid inundation of water, and this was confirmed in analysis looking at the south
side of the Spencer Gulf. And the dating of the inundation, between 6,365 and 8,445 years
ago. And so this story must be around this age. The next story comes from Kangaroo Island,
which lies at the mouth of the Gulf of St Vincent. The story is about the drowning of
a channel which is known today as Backstairs Passage, and it involves the ancestral hero
called Ngurunderi, who chased his two wives who were trying to run away from him. He saw
them cross a strip of land, or in another version of the stories, they cross where there
are boulders which you could wade or swim between, to get to Kangaroo Island. And this
land they crossed is the channel known today as Backstairs Passage. But Ngurunderi is angry
by the women’s escape, and in his anger he forces the sea to rise, producing a terrible
flood, waters were said to have came with a terrific rush, sweeping the women south
into the open ocean, drowning them and turning them to into rocks that now jut out of the
water between the island and the mainland, rocks that are today known as the Pages.
If this story is based on true geographical changes, it would mean it originated at a
time when seas were around 32m or 100 feet lower than they are today, making this story
around 9,800 to 10,650 years old. Next, we have a story from the Wellesley Islands, which
sit on the continental shelf which would have formed a land bridge connecting Australia
to New Guinea. Because of the flast nature of the continental shelf and its size, the
rise of sea levels would have been more noticeable here than at any other part of the Australian
coast. Here the story is told of a giant kangaroo that gouged a trench with a magic bone, and
white capped waves and a torrent of water poured in, spilling into the marsh lands,
and flooding the lagoons until they overflowed. And that is how the great gulf came to be.
And a story that is remarkably similar to the first I mentioned of Spencer Gulf. But
also from this area there are stories that describe the creation of five of the Wellesley
Islands that were created when Garnguur, a Seagull Woman, who swept down and dragged
her raft across the peninsula, back and forth, carving a hole that would eventually allowing
the sea to pour in. The sea here is only 5 to 10 meters deep, so no deeper than 30 feet
now, and as such it is grouped with the younger stories at around 8000 years old. And in the
final story I’ll mention, we shall look at the Tiwi people from around the Bathurst
and Melville Islands. They have a story that starts like this: “In the beginning of the
world there was complete darkness, and from this darkness one one day an old blind woman
miraculously appeared, and her name was Mudangkala.” Although there are some stories that have
her digging herself out of the ground. And as Mudangkala crawled along the land, she
carved out islands, and the water followed her, and continued into the place that we
call Clarence Strait today. She continued to move over the land known as Bathurst Island,
until finally, water flowed into what is now known as Apsley Strait.“ This reference
of crawling may be an inference to the water being shallow, meaning that crossing could
occur but there was still a need to wade or swim through water. For this to be the case
then the sea levels would have to be 12 meters lower, or 40 feet. Although it could be as
low as 20 meters, or 65 feet under today’s level, and this story would have still been
possible. And from sea level data this would make the story between 8,200 and 9650 years
old. Now there are many other stories which I can go over in another video if there is
demand, but for now what do all these stories mean? All these stories I’ve mentioned are
all similar in how they recall a time on the Australian coastline, where the coastline
suffered some kind of flooding, and that part of the coastline that is now permanently underwater.
Some stories are narrative, some mythology, and whilst half of these came directly from
Aboriginal sources, half came via European documentation, and so could be subject to
alteration or mistranslation. But with 21 stories, across the entire coastline, it would
seem as though these pieces of evidence, when combined together, give us confidence that
these stories are credible rather than having been made up to explain the current land and
seascape. Besides it is very unlikely a story is made up about land disappearing, normally
stories about landscape changes discuss additions to the landscapes, meteorite craters, or holes
in the ground, not land that is flooded and that you can’t see anymore. We can have
a look at sea level rise aligned to the stories on these graphs. The first shows the Wellesley
Island event and the Bathurst and Melville Island flooding event happening between 7,500
and 10,000 years ago. And the next graph shows the Kangaroo Island and Spencer Gulf events,
along side others, happening up to 13,000 years ago. And this, all together, tells us
two things. That humans observed a post-glacial sea level rise, and that some cultures are
able to demonstrate an extraordinary life and accuracy of an orally told story. Now
there will be some of you linking these sea levels rise to the flood story, either from
Noah, or Gilgamesh, or the others that we know were told in ancient times. And there
are stories from India and the Eastern Mediterranean, but these are far more fragmented in where
they are told and how. They have suffered from this narrative embellishment through
the generational journey, meaning the sources of the stories cannot be accurately assessed.
It is just supposition that these relate to the sea level rises associated with the post
Glacial maximum, but it may just add some confidence to those who feel these stories
are connected. And so given this, does this mean that the Aboriginal oral story telling
ability is unique, or are there other cultures in other places of the world telling stories
that are 10,000 years old? Well, as mentioned early, there are a number of environmental
and culture considerations that gave rise to a perfect stage on which to tell these
stories within the aboriginal culture, the need for accuracy and teaching of the landscape
that is so important to them, coupled with their isolation. And this is without consideration
of the conservative nature of aboriginal culture when compared to the more innovative nature
of, lets say, the proto-Indo European cultures, and the aboriginal mantra of “gotta tell
this story the right way”. However, it is impossible to go back in time to prove these
stories were being told orally, but it is now also impossible to prove they weren’t.
But the sea level rise had a huge impact on aboriginal culture, Australia lost nearly
25% of its land mass in this time. But to continue to tell these stories thousands of
years after the events that caused them, events that haven’t happened since? Why were they
remembered? I mean why tell a story about an island that you can’t see, that is no
longer part of the landscape, such as the marshlands disappearing in a couple of the
stories? Is it because the story is part of a package of stories that have always been
told? That it is part of the story of the culture to tell them? What does seems likely
is that the research around these 21 stories from 21 coastline places around Australia
are an incredibly rare example of orally transmitted stories many thousands of years old, and not
yet affected by other cultures embellishments, embellishments that have affected the proto-Indo
European folktales we’ve discussed in previous videos. And so perhaps they should be captured
properly and kept as an archive of such an important piece of human cultural history.
But there is one more story about this age that we know of, but the evidence isn’t
as strong due to the lack of data, and that comes from North America, but I will cover
that in a future video. And of course, we have the oldest story that we know of still
to come, and something older than that too. And I’ll get those videos out as soon as
I can. So please like the video and subscribe to the channel if you’re enjoying these,
it helps a lot and costs you nothing to do. Your support is really appreciated so thank
you. And for those who have stayed until the end I’ll also place a reference to the original
paper by Reid and Nunn in the description of this video in case you want to look further
into these stories. And so, until the next video, please, stay safe, stay well, and this
was Crecganford.