Ancient Celtic bards were famous for the sheer quantity of
information they could memorise. This included thousands of songs,
stories, chants and poems that could take hours to recite in full.
Today we are pretty spoiled. Practically the whole of human knowledge
is conveniently available at our fingertips. Why worry about memorising
something when we can simply Google it?
The answer seems pretty evident when we go into a panic after losing our smartphones!
Long before the ancient Celts, Aboriginal Australians were recording
vast scores of knowledge to memory and passing it to successive
generations.
Aboriginal people demonstrate that their oral traditions are not only
highly detailed and complex, but they can survive – accurately – for thousands, even tens of thousands, of years.
Yet I struggle to remember what I did last Tuesday. So how did they do it?
Researcher Lynne Kelly was drawn to this question while investigating Aboriginal knowledge about animals for her PhD.
It was evident to Kelly that Aboriginal people catalogued huge scores
of information about animals – including species types, physical
features, behaviour, links to food and plants – and wondered how they do
it. Read More
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