[watwut]

Because most tales humans produce right now are fanciful. People in the past told stories for many reasons, survival being one, fun another, their political conflict being yet another.

But also, I am quite confident contemporary researches don't take old tales as total lies, but neither as total truth.

[snapdangle]

Except that in an orally transmitted culture, stories are _also_ told to communicate actual, factual history.

So the issue is that we no longer communicate our history through stories told out loud and therefore decided not to be able to conceive of any culture actually doing the same.

[watwut]

And those stories transform with needs of each generation. We don't trust what past people wrote about their own history either and not just because of fantastic elements.

[snapdangle]

You cannot judge another society's approach to history based on how we treat it.

The presumption of rapidly shifting history in orally transmitted culture is being debunked by this and other works. The shame is that if people would just for a second stop coming from places of assumption like the one you have written, we wouldn't need to wait for research to prove it is worth listening to before trying to learn from it.