The Edge of Memory: Ancient Stories, Oral Tradition, and the Post-Glacial World

In The Edge of Memory (2018), Patrick Nunn argues that humans have preserved within their oral traditions memories of past events that occurred more than 7,000 years ago. Despite the seeming outlandishness of the claim—how could humans pass down specific information accurately for hundreds of generations when most of us barely know who are great-grandparents even are?—there is a narrow area of his evidence that seems convincing. Nunn’s strongest argument is that Aboriginal Australians, living in an oral culture in which accurate knowledge of the natural world was crucial for survival, have passed down memories of dramatic sea level rise that occurred about 7,000 – 13,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age. Many of the Aboriginal stories that Nunn collects refer to specific areas of the Australian coast such as Spencer Gulf and the Wellesley Islands, recounting a time when water rushed in or rose to permanently drown coastal areas and create gulfs and islands where contiguous land once existed, in a manner that could match what scientists have determined actually happened in those locations. As wild as this sounds, many indigenous Australian peoples employ a complex system of cross-checking within families to ensure that stories are passed down accurately over the generations.

However, when Nunn strays from Aboriginal Australian tales of rising sea levels, the plausibility of his argument plummets. The myths he relates from other areas of the world are far too vague to relate to specific historical events, with the exception of the Klamath story of the eruption that created Crater Lake 7,600 years ago. In fact, one occasionally wonders why Nunn shoehorned in these other areas of the world when his argument so clearly holds the most merit in the specific and unique geographic and demographic conditions in Australia. I almost put the book down in an early chapter when Nunn suggests that the story of Prometheus chained to the mountains and having his liver torn out by an eagle could recall a volcanic eruption, because Prometheus’s agonized screaming would resemble the sounds of an eruption, and eruption clouds sometimes look like eagles. What troubles me the most is how this interpretation of the Prometheus myth discounts the deeper, non-literal meanings of this myth, about the contentious relationship between humans and gods and the origins of sacrifice. The book is conspicuously missing the voices of any contemporary Aboriginal Australian people, leaving readers to wonder if these myths hold other, more important meanings to the people who tell them, meanings that could contradict the claim that these stories record historical events. If anyone is aware of an indigenous response to this book, I would love to read it.

Finally, a bit of a diversion for a particular pet peeve of mine: how endnotes are presented in nonfiction books. In my opinion, the best books label each page in the endnotes section with “Notes to pages x-x,” making it easy to find the note you’re looking for regardless of where you are in the book. The worst provide no such labeling, and instead require you to determine the chapter you’re currently reading (which is easy to forget if the pages in the chapter aren’t titled with the chapter number) and then go digging through the endnotes until you find the notes for the proper chapter, and then search for the original note number. The Edge of Memory has the latter system, which is especially frustrating because important information is often buried in those notes, such when certain myths were first recorded. In one case, Nunn describes a “greenhorn geologist” who reports that certain Fijian myths contain memories of volcanic eruptions, only to bury in the endnotes that this geologist is indeed him, meaning that this anecdote which seems to indicate a network of scholars who support Nunn’s theories actually provides no additional weight to his argument. This may seem like a somewhat petty complaint, but as soon as it seems like you’re using endnotes to obscure information rather than provide it, my BS radar goes off.

That being said, this book does present exciting possibilities about the power of human memory. If you’re interested in indigenous knowledge, the limits of human memory, or the preservation of knowledge in myth, it’s worth checking out The Edge of Memory, if only to determine for yourself if the argument holds water.

The accompanying image is © The Trustees of the British Museum, released under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. It depicts an ornamental pubic cover known as a riji or jakuli, created before the 1920s by an unknown Aboriginal Australian artist in Western Australia. The riji is made of pearlshell, decorated with ochre, and attached to a cord made from human hair.

An ornamental pubic cover known as a riji or jakuli, created before the 1920s by an unknown Aboriginal Australian artist in Western Australia. The riji is made of pearlshell, decorated with ochre, and attached to a cord made from human hair.