[londons_explore]

100 years might be the limit of how long knowledge can last and still be useful enough though. 100 years is probably 6 generations.

Imagine explaining a complex process, like how to change the ink cartridge on a printer, via a chain of chinese whispers. Now put 20 years between each step of the chain, and remember all the intermediate people can't practice or try the skill they are described - they simply have to imagine it, since they have no fire to play with.

If the knowledge lasts that long, when a forest fire does happen, people only have one chance to figure out how to keep it alive. Accidentally put wet wood on it just once, and it's dead again for another 100 years.

[NeedMoreTea]

It was often not Chinese whispers though -- that's dismissive. Our being "modern" there's a tendency to think because they didn't have ink cartridges and internets they were stupid and all knowledge ephemeral. How about an alternative that fits with aboriginal, and African oral culture:

Imagine explaining a complex process, using language carefully structured to be memorable, to the next generation. Then spending hours repeating, testing and checking their recollection over the coming days and years to ensure their memory is as yours. Rather like rote learning of tables and other "modern" learning. 2x2=4 doesn't become something else that way.

Each generation gets a complex story they may not see the applicability of, but if it's evolved to be important in the culture to remember, maybe they figured ways to remember until it is useful again. Africans did, pre-Medieval Europeans did, and for the longest period known, aborigines did. Why not these?

[iguy]

Agree that oral transmission was an important & practiced skill. But I do wonder about how well it let you transmit "technological" knowledge, in a manner that could be turned back into practice. Do we have any examples of people doing this?

My counter-example is various failures to reproduce early industrial-revolution processes... from memory, wasn't there a stage when the French were pushing to catch up in iron-making, and sent spies to England, from whose accounts they could not make the process work? Despite having not just words, but materials and examples of the result. (The solution, eventually, was to pay people who had the knack to move there.)

[ColanR]

I think you underestimate how much better a pre-literate culture is at memorization, compared to a culture with the luxury of writing. It would be more useful to find an example of a similar pre-literate culture to make your point.

[iguy]

No, the point I was trying to make is that even with absolutely perfect transmission (which is the best they could hope for) it can be very difficult to translate words back into actions. It's also hard to learn golf or dancing from a book (again, perfect error-free memorisation) because there's a lot of knowledge which doesn't fit well into words. Muscle memory, once you've got it.

I presume this was also true of the making of stone tools, or pottery. And of the recognition of edible plants & mushrooms. All of these are skills which I'd be surprised to see transmitted over a long time-lapse. (Without being at all surprised by the memorisation of stories, at a level I could never match.)

[NeedMoreTea]

The most recent example might be the Australian aborigines fire rituals. After this year's bush fires there have been many calls to use their fire ritual burnings once again. I gather this has been done in the Northern Territories for a few years, and is far more successful than advanced, technological and knowledge filled approaches (Western arrogance that our way must be better) that pushed the traditional out for decades. They seem to have kept more than enough to be far better at it than those meant to know. How well they work in a significantly changed climate is another question, but it appears to work better.

Speculating wildly here, we don't know the Neanderthals didn't ritualise the activity into a dance or an act to retain some of the process as well as the words. As we do with dancing, martial arts, even theatre or early stages of ancient apprenticeships. That might transmit the muscle memory of golf or stone tool making -- without the practised skill. How far that remains applicable using a stick in place of a golf club, or pine cone in place of a lump of flint is impossible to guess, but puts you closer than mere words.

I have to assume they wouldn't suffer the Wikipedia tendency to explain the technical so technically perfect (including all obscure jargon) that it's often bordering on impossible for an intelligent outsider, deeply skilled in other technical fields, to follow. :)

[iguy]

What's the time-period for the firebreaks? I mean when these skills last used, even if on a smallish scale?

OK, ritualising a "how to ride a bicycle dance" seems like it could be a way to pass more information than a perfectly repeated poem / book. (Perhaps thinking of oral tradition as meaning Homer not how to chip flint is a blind spot in how we think about such things?) Would still be extremely curious to know of any examples where this actually happened.

[Sharlin]

People passed down complex oral culture with no "practical use" – myths and stories – very reliably over dozens, maybe hundreds of generations. We became very good at using rhythm and rhyme as error correction mechanisms to ensure a low frequency of replication errors. But anyway, forest fires simply wouldn't have been that rare in the first place.

[perl4ever]

"People passed down complex oral culture with no "practical use"

You're not arguing with what you're responding to, are you? Knowledge with no practical use can accommodate a lot more imprecision. Reliability in a context where details aren't tested is a fuzzy concept.