[aetherson]

Come on, you can't take legends from circa 1500 AD to be evidence of anything that happened somewhere between 11,000 and 20,000 years earlier, especially without writing. It's far more likely that primitive cannibal tribes were made up wholesale than that societies carried the memory of them for more than 10,000 years.

[jnicholasp]

The Klamath Native American tribe has legends of the eruption of Mt. Mazama that formed Oregon's Crater Lake - which happened in ~5677 BC [1]. If oral legends that reflect real events can last seven and a half thousand years, is there any reason to think they couldn't last 15ky, or 20ky? It seems to me all that's needed is a continuous cultural line.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Llao

[acid__]

Well, it wouldn't be entirely unprecedented.

See: "Indigenous Australian storytelling accurately records sea level rises 7,000 years ago"

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/sep/16/indig...