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

Nunn (Vanished Islands and Hidden Continents of the Pacific), a geography professor at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Australia, unites his interests in earth science and oral history in this intriguing work that seeks to discover how long humans can preserve memories of significant events in the planet’s past. He leads readers through a tour of 21 sites throughout Australia, all of them linked to a story from Aboriginal oral tradition describing some offshore feature of the site that was once accessible. For each, he provides an estimate of how far below the current sea level the waters must have been for the story to be true, and then follows with a discussion of sea level rises and falls over the last 150,000 years, concluding this section with a chart giving estimates (ranging from 7,450 to 13,310 years ago) of when the water depths he has calculated existed. This brief for the antiquity of aboriginal stories represents his strongest argument, with other sections on sea level change in other locales and on other geological events such as volcanic explosions being less fully considered. Still, Nunn’s hypothesis—that “human memories can remain alive for many millennia” through oral tradition—deserves consideration by earth scientists, folklore scholars, and interested nonspecialists.[em] (Jan.) [/em]