A mask by an unidentified Makonde artist of the mid-20th century QCC Art Gallery of the City University of New York, Smithsonian Magazine.
Once, they were thought to be. Then they were not. Now, it seems possible that many might be.
Recent genetic research into the origins of the Swahili people of East Africa strongly suggests that the ancient account of their kings, known as the Kilwa Chronicle, is substantially correct. In that narrative, the Swahili people of Africa are said to have originated in Persia (Iran) and began mixing with Africans one thousand or more years ago.[1]
Other research over the last decade or so has also provided support for the likelihood that traditional narratives, previously dismissed as fables, probably do record events that happened in deep time.
The frenzy of story collecting that accompanied the mercantile and colonial expansion of Europe from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth century led to the first attempts to understand the world’s massive body of folk and traditional narrative. Excited scholars proposed many theories of the origins and diffusion of these tales. Was it simply coincidence that the same stories, in one or another variation, appeared time and time again among cultures not known to have ever had any direct connection? How old were they? Could they be true?
The answer to the first question may be ‘as old as time’, at least human time.
Using the Gaia space telescope, astronomers studying the constellations and how they appear in various mythologies across the world have recently added further evidence for the antiquity of story. The star pattern known as the Pleiades was the object of mythmaking in many ancient cultures, many of which refer to seven stars that make it up. Today, we can only see six stars, but 100 000 years ago, seven stars would have been visible, strongly suggesting that the Australian Aboriginal Seven Sisters songline, the Greek story of the seven daughters of Atlas and similar storylines in African, Native American and Asian traditions had their origins in the way things were one hundred millennia ago.[2]
The answer to the second question is equally momentous.
Stories of a great flood appear so often in so many of the world’s narrative traditions that many have concluded there must have been some such event or events in antiquity. Noah and his Ark may be the most familiar to many, but there are an immense number of variations on the theme. Until recently, the trend has been to dismiss oral traditions of historical or pre-historic events as fantasy. But research linking scientific evidence with indigenous stories has brought about a more nuanced interpretation.[3] One topic which can now be linked to provable pre-historic events is the inundation of land. Twenty or more Australian Aboriginal stories of such events are thought to be around 10 000 years old.[4]
One of those traditions is that of the Narrinyeri (Ngarrindjeri and other spellings) people of Lake Alexandrina and the Lower Murray region of what is now South Australia. They recounted a tradition of their great ancestor, Nurundere (also Martummere) to German Lutheran missionary, Heinrich Meyer, in the 1840s. This version of the story, part of a longer sequence, tells how Nurundere came to create a passage between Kangaroo Island and the mainland by causing the sea to ‘flow’ and so punishing his two fleeing wives. [5] Kangaroo Island was separated from what is now the mainland of South Australia around seven thousand years ago.
In 2020, archaeologists working in north-western Australia discovered Aboriginal settlements beneath the sea near the Burrup Peninsula at Cape Brugieres. The drowning of these sites is thought to have occurred between 7000 to 8500 years ago.[6]
Using weather patterns and other evidence, researchers have discovered that Polynesian oral traditions of sunken lands can be correlated with geological events.[7] Subsequent research in Australia found evidence that Aboriginal stories of a great flood on the east coast of the continent reflect a verified rising of sea levels around 7000 years in the past.[8]
Related research suggests that indigenous traditions in both Australia and Brazil might carry memories of the megafauna who were extinct by 40 000 years ago.[9] Adrienne Mayor has looked closely at the connections between fossil remains and First American myths and legends and at the archaeological evidence for warrior women.[10] Other researchers have used DNA evidence to trace the migration of narrative motifs from South Siberia to North America around twelve thousand years ago.[11]
In 2020, a team of geologists suggested that the Gunditjmara story explaining the origins of the volcano they call Budj Bim might relate to an event that occurred in southeastern Australia around 37 000 years ago. They suggest that ‘If aspects of oral traditions pertaining to Budj Bim or its surrounding lava landforms reflect volcanic activity, this could be interpreted as evidence for these being some of the oldest oral traditions in existence’.[12]
The extensive amount of archaeological and palaeontological research currently underway in all parts of the world is revealing new evidence of human occupation, journeying and interacting.[13] In recent years some of these discoveries and interpretations of them have rewritten the history of humankind. Some important parts of that history are held in age old tales.
[1] Brielle, E.S., Fleisher, J., Wynne-Jones, S. et al. ‘Entwined African and Asian genetic roots of medieval peoples of the Swahili coast’. Nature 615, 866–873 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-05754-w.
[2] Efrosyni Boutsikas, Stephen C. McCluskey and John Steele (eds), Advancing Cultural Astronomy: Studies in Honour of Clive Ruggles, Springer International Publishing, 2021.
[3] Timothy Burberry, Geomythology: How Common Stories Reflect Earth Events, Routledge, 2021.
[4] Patrick Nunn, The Edge of Memory: Ancient Stories, Oral Tradition and the Post-Glacial World, Bloomsbury, London, 2018.
[5] Collected by Meyer and quoted in Rev George Taplin, The Native Tribes of South Australia, E S Wigg & Son, Adelaide, 1879, pp. 60-61.
[6] Benjamin J, O’Leary M, McDonald J, Wiseman C, McCarthy J, Beckett E, et al. (2020) ‘Aboriginal artefacts on the continental shelf reveal ancient drowned cultural landscapes in northwest Australia’. PLoS ONE 15(7): e0233912.
[7] Patrick D Nunn, Vanished Islands and Hidden Continents of the Pacific, University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, 2009.
[8] Patrick D. Nunn & Nicholas J. Reid (2016) ‘Aboriginal Memories of Inundation of the Australian Coast Dating from More than 7000 Years Ago’, Australian Geographer, 47:1, 11-47, DOI: 10.1080/00049182.2015.1077539. See also Patrick Nunn, The Edge of Memory.
[9] Patrick D Nunn and Luiza Corral Martins de Oliviera Ponciano, ‘Of bunyips and other beasts: living memories of long-extinct creatures in art and stories’, The Conversation, April 15, 2019 at https://theconversation.com/of-bunyips-and-other-beasts-living-memories-of-long-extinct-creatures-in-art-and-stories-113031, accessed January 2020.
[10] Adrienne Mayor, Fossil Legends of the First Americans. Princeton University Press, 2005 and The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women across the Ancient World. Princeton University Press, 2014.
[11] Korotayev, Andrey. ‘Genes and Myths: Which Genes and Myths Did the Different Waves of the Peopling of Americas Bring to the New World.’ History & Mathematics (2017): n. pag. Print.
[12] Erin L. Matchan, David Phillips, Fred Jourdan, and Korien Oostingh, ‘Early human occupation of southeastern Australia: New insights from 40Ar/39Ar dating of young volcanoes’, Geology, Volume 48, Number 4, 1 April 2020 at
[13] Some further examples in Graham Seal, ‘Story Makes Us Human’, Gristly History, 11 March 2023, https://wordpress.com/post/gristlyhistory.blog/1094.
GRISTLY HISTORY 