[NoTeslaThrow]

Well we have plenty of records of people who did pay attention. (American?) Society as a whole isn't very good at focusing on what will care about in the future.

Anyway, it's not easy to turn oral history into speculation about the literal past. There's a reason such work focuses so much on geology! It's likely oral traditions encode a lot more literal history than we realize, but the ability to verify or interpret this as "history" in the western sense of "historiography" may be fundamentally impossible for large swathes of it.

[wahern]

Western disbelief in the veracity of oral traditions isn't confined to cultures outside the West. It's as strongly antagonistic, if not more so, to Western traditions. If it's not written down, it didn't happen; and if it contradicts even one scrap of written literature, it absolutely couldn't have happened, no matter how overwhelming the non-written corpus of evidence. Heck, Europe birthed an entire religion, Protestantism, predicted on "sola scriptura".

OTOH, this insistence on verifiable data that can be easily shared and critiqued undergirds much technological progress. If the price to be paid in its excesses is the loss of historical knowledge, perhaps it's been worth it.