The following is an overview of the last twenty years of research and writing on memory, Indigenous knowledge systems and archaeology. This research built on my previous 40 years in education. These ideas led to a PhD and six books, The Knowledge Gene, Memory Craft, The Memory Code, Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies, Songlines: the power and promise and Songlines for younger readers.
Indigenous knowledge keepers have been shown to store practical knowledge of many hundreds of animals including all the insects as well as thousands of plants and their relationship to all the humans with whom they interact within their own community and beyond. Along with botany and zoology, there’s an integrated knowledge bank covering agriculture, history, music, astronomy, geology, theology, meteorology, natural resources, climate science, geography, navigation, ecology, law, philosophy and almost every domain within the university curriculum.
Without books or modern technologies to store information, how did our non-literate ancestors remember all this stuff?
We can learn so much from our First Nations colleagues. Maintaining oral traditions depends on a suite of technologies which optimise accurate retention of information, skills we don’t recognise as mnemonic technologies in a literate culture. But we can use these alongside literacy – we can have it all! [For more details on specific topics, click on the links below.]
Music as an innate way of knowing
Figurines make characters real
Uniquely human ways of knowing
You are human, the result of a startling story of evolution. Being human, unlike any other species, you can produce art, perform music, tell stories, debate philosophy and engage with your environment as a memory palace. We are the only species that can move to any territory on the planet, adapt and learn how to survive there.
But, unlike other species, you cannot survive in watery depths, build a delicate web of the finest silk nor fly thousands of miles, navigating unaided. As humans, we have a unique set of skills. As literate humans, we have stopped using some of this innate potential.
Why did evolution embed in all humans the potential for story, music and art and then cause every human population to spend inordinate amounts of time, effort and resources persuing these seemingly impractical acts? And why has evolution ensured that every population on earth has its fair share of neurodiverse individuals?
Evolution has done all this to enable human populations to learn vast amounts of knowledge, store it, update it and share it in the most memorable ways possible.
Universal, ancient, innate ways of knowing
Indigenous cultures the world over use song and story, music and performance to ensure that their immense banks of knowledge are retained in a way that they are available over long time spans and across the entire community. Everything from details of the environment in which they live and how to navigate it, the relationships with the humans and animals within it and cultural beliefs are all stored using these oral technologies. All this knowledge is brought to life in spectacular ceremonies. Only humans do this.
Women from Ghana dance at an event to raise community awareness about healthy behaviors.
(USAID/Kasia McCormick), 2012. Public Domain.
Indigenous cultures the world over use their finesse with manipulating large and small spaces to conceive a living landscape brought to life with mythological beings. They create art forms and associate information with these large and small spaces. The storytellers narrate fantastic tales reflected in the art. Only humans do this.
The archaeological record clearly indicates that these ways of knowing date back at least 40,000 years. These innate human aptitudes date deep into the long story of our species.
We cannot have suddenly developed the ability to paint on cave walls, carve into rock faces, perform complex knowledge and engage with music. The complex process of making a flute must depend on gradual development long before 40,000 years – a date I chose because there is robust archaeological evidence for what I am saying from then.
By humans, I include Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis), who share the critical genetic component described in The Knowledge Gene. The Divje Babe flute, shown above, is alleged to be Neanderthal. (National Museum of Slovenia. Measures 133.6 mm long. Photo: Petar Milošević / CC BY-SA, Wikipedia.
The only explanation for the fundamental importance in all humans and no other animal, is that these skills are innate in our species universally. This prowess must be biologically driven by the human genome.
Memory makes us who we are
For the vast majority of human history, there was no writing. Our ancestors had to memorise immeasurable amounts of information in order to survive both physically and culturally. We can glimpse the memory technologies enabled by our unique human genome through cultures who do not use writing.
What we’ve lost in contemporary society is the skill of using our genome-gifted prowess to train our memories.
Our ancestors left Africa and adapted to every environment on the planet. As environments changed, they adapted. As they learnt, so their ability to take advantage of every aspect of the environment grew. They did all this without writing. Everything they knew had to be stored within communal memory.
Think about astronomy. To build up navigational know-how and run a calendar from the stars, they must have recalled the patterns of the moving skyscape year after year and kept those patterns in memory. To follow resources, animal and plant, they must be able to predict the weather, again depending on patterns built up over many years.
A Sky Full Of Stars: Snowdonia National Park, United Kingdom, Image: Joshua Earle, Public Domain
How will predominant wind direction change when that star becomes visible above the horizon? What plant flowers at exactly the right time to tell us that we need to move to the higher ground to follow the herds? It is only with that detailed knowledge in memory that humans were able to flourish and constantly adapt. That is the unique genius of our species.
You cannot depend soley on knowledge stored in dusty volumes on library shelves or deep in the Internet to solve new problems. You need to be able to hold information in memory if you are to see new connections and new ways to use what you already know. That is creativity.
You can learn new ideas and then sing them, paint them, sculpt them and tell stories woven around what you have discovered. That artistry is uniquely human. That degree of innovation enabled humans over the last 40,000 years, at least, to establish a suite of extraordinary ways of knowing.
This is in our nature, deep within our genome. Every human population showcases the same basic set of knowledge technologies. Different expressions of the stories, songs, art and performances are nurtured, but the underlying mechanisms are universal, innate and uniquely human in nature. Evolution made sure of it.
Notes – 40,000 Years of Knowing
1 O. Sacks, Musicophilia, Picador, London, 2011, pp. 105–28.
2 I. Peretz & D. Vuvan, ‘Prevalence of congenital amusia’, European Journal of Human Genetics, vol. 25, 2017, p. 625.
3 I. Morley, ‘Hunter-gatherer music and its implications for identifying intentionality in the use of acoustic space’, in C. Scarre & G. Lawson (eds), Archaeoacoustics, McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Cambridge, 2006, p. 103.
4 R.H. Finnegan, Oral Poetry: Its nature, significance and social context, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1977, pp. 98, 119–21; W.J. Ong, ‘African talking drums and oral noetics’, New Literary History, vol. 8, no. 3, 1977, pp. 411–29.
5 Two excellent resources to watch Australian Aboriginal dances are: P. Cameron (writer), Dance on Your Land, Woomera Aboriginal Corporation, Ronin Films, Civic Square, 1993; and T. Graham (writer), Ceremony: The Djungguwan of Northeast Arnhem Land, Film Australia, Lindfield, 2006.
6 L. Kelly, Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies: Orality, memory and the transmission of culture, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2015, pp. xv–xviii.
7 D.C. Rubin, Memory in Oral Traditions: The cognitive psychology of epic, ballads, and counting-out rhymes, Oxford University Press, New York, 1995, p. 112.
8 H. Morphy, Aboriginal Art, Phaidon Press, London, 1998, pp. 183–84.
9 D.L. Fixico, The American Indian Mind in a Linear World: American Indian studies and traditional knowledge, Routledge, New York, 2003, p. 25.
10 M. Neale & L. Kelly, Songlines: The power and promise, Thames & Hudson, Melbourne, 2020. There are very many references to Aboriginal knowledge being linked to songlines, but it is not only that of men. Women’s knowledge is often neglected. A fascinating work is C.J. Ellis & L. Barwick, ‘Antikirinja women’s song knowledge 1963–72: Its significance in Antikirinja culture’, in P. Brock (ed.), Women, Rites and Sites: Aboriginal women’s cultural knowledge, Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest, 1989, pp. 21–40.
11 M. Campbell, ‘Memory and monumentality in the Rarotongan landscape’, Antiquity, vol. 80, no. 307, 2006, pp. 102–17.
12 D. Turnbull, ‘Maps, narratives and trails: Performativity, hodology and distributed knowledges in complex adaptive systems—an approach to emergent mapping’, Geographical Research, vol. 45, no. 2, 2007, p. 142.
13 J. Vansina, Oral Tradition as History, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1985, p. 45; E.M. McClelland, The Cult of Ifa among the Yoruba, Ethnographica, London, 1982, p. 71.
14 Tyson’s words here come from a document he wrote for a research team in which we are both involved. He gave permission for me to quote him here.
15 There are many resources describing the extraordinary astronomical skills of First Nations cultures, all including the way the knowledge keepers decode the spatial knowledge from song. Four of my favourites on the topic are: R.D. Haynes, ‘Astronomy and the Dreaming: The astronomy of the Aboriginal Australians’, in H. Selin (ed.), Astronomy Across Cultures: The history of non-Western astronomy, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, 2000; J. MacDonald, The Arctic Sky: Inuit astronomy, star lore, and legend, Royal Ontario Museum/Nunavut Research Institute, Ontario, 1998; J.E. Reyman, ‘Priests, power, and politics: Some implications of socioceremonial control’, in J.B. Carlson & J.W. Judge (eds), Astronomy and Ceremony in the Prehistoric Southwest, Maxwell Museum of Anthropology, Albuquerque, 1987, pp. 121–47; and D. Hamacher, The First Astronomers: How Indigenous elders read the stars, Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest, 2022.
16 J. Green, C. Algy & F. Meakins, ‘Tradition and innovation: How we are documenting sign language in a Gurindji community in northern Australia’, The Conversation, 12 December 2022, https://the
conversation.com/tradition-and-innovation-how-we-are-documenting-
sign-language-in-a-gurindji-community-in-northern-australia-194524?.
17 C. Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1966, p. 6.
18 J. Fentress & C. Wickham, Social Memory, Blackwell, Oxford, 1992, p. 50.
19 H. Morphy, Ancestral Connections: Art and an Aboriginal system of knowledge, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1991, p. 167.
20 C.B. Keibel, ‘Memory sticks and other mnemonic devices’, The Nigerian Field, vol. 55, no. 3/4, 1990, pp. 91–98.
21 W.R. Bascom, Sixteen Cowries: Yoruba divination from Africa to the New World, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1980.
22 E.M. McClelland, The Cult of Ifa among the Yoruba. Ethnographica, London, 1982.
23 B. Tedlock, Time and the Highland Maya (rev. edn), University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1992, pp. 163–67.