Is oral history more durable than written history?

It's certainly more durable than digital history in the archives of private companies who will stop maintaining it at the slightest slowdown of profit growth.

Using 12000-year-old stories to support the thesis that oral history is more durable than written history is only logical if we have reason to believe that written history also existed then. I believe the consensus is that writing was invented about 5000-6000 years ago.

Still, finding that a non-zero fraction of oral history survives on the order of tens of millennia is very cool.

Answer: No.

You have to be very stingy with your definition of history and writing to ignore the fossil record as a recording of historical events. We'll revisit the question in several hundred million years and see how oral traditions are doing.

Fun facts, there is an important Islamic tradition where group of people (tens or hundreds thousands of them) called Hafiz who can memorize and recite the entire Quran. If for example, God forbid, that the entire written copies either physicallly or digitally of the Quran are entirely destroyed, it can be recreated completely in no time. This practice is considered a living miracle since no other holy book has this special feature and it is also well known fact that even the Pope does not memorize the New Testament Bible let alone the complete Bible.

Written or Oral. We can't all agree on what happened 2 years ago. So multiply how we all view the last 2 years, then extrapolate that to what you tell your kids, and they tell their kids, and add a 100 years.

The last few years has caused me to doubt all history. All written or oral records are all

Leaving the stupid clickbait headline that has nothing to do with the actual article...

It is pretty cool to see aboriginal oral traditions (of up to 14,000 years old according to the article) being used to map the rising sea levels over thousands of years.

For some unknown reason that wapo shortcut doesn't allow for scrolling down to actually read that article.

So back to more reliable external means:

https://archive.is/TNFck

This is why Hindu traditions in India have a "parampara" which means disciplic succession or tradition of teaching from guru (teacher) down to disciple. Writing only started with palm leaf manuscripts, before that everything was passed by word of mouth which is why Indic scholars say its hard to date things by written word as things were not written, just spoken and handed down. This is not the same as Chinese whispers, the oral tradition was very important and had to be word for word.

It seems like the properties attributed in this opinion piece to oral history are actually properties of copying. If there are a lot of copies then a disaster is unlikely to destroy them all.

But, printing, especially Movable Type, makes it practical to produce copies of written history. And then digital computers make it not just practical but essentially free.

My understanding is that historians wouldn't call this "Oral history" but instead "Oral tradition". Because we now have technology to make and copy records, to them "Oral history" is the records of what people recall about something, typically first hand recollections. When you do this, mutation stops, which is valuable to historians.

Example #1: Ronald Reagan gets elected US President. Written history, that this happened is directly recorded when it happened. Written History. Many copies. No mutations.

Example #2: Someone from Reagan's campaign recounts to a historian the events of the election night as they realised he was going to win and this is recorded on tape. Oral History. Many copies. Mutations fixed at moment of recording shortly after election.

Example #3: I recall hearing that Reagan was elected President and mention this to a historian in 2023 during a recorded conversation. It is PCM data and it's also auto-transcribed with transcription checked and corrected by the historian. Oral History. Fewer but still N copies. Mutations fixed only decades after event that was recalled.

Example #4: Our intern re-tells the story she heard from me about Reagan being elected, on a podcast. She wasn't born until this century, so she wasn't a witness to the event, but she did hear me tell the story. Now arguably Oral tradition. Many Copies. Considerable mutation.

Example #5: The podcast for some crazy reason goes viral. Mutated versions of the Reagan story, now sometimes naming Clint Eastwood for some reason, circulate. A popular "re-staging" of the text has an unnamed British woman hearing that Clint Eastwood has been elected on the radio, after Rick Astley's famous "Never Gonna Give You Up" is played, which means now it's the wrong man, the wrong year and little of the story has survived. This is definitely Oral Tradition. Huge numbers of copies. Mutations never cease.

Clearly some types of history lend themselves very well to oral preservation. Religious texts and certain types of history come to mind.

I very much doubt though that ALL types of history would be good for that, let alone other types of information. Not a lot of dry econometrics textbooks lend themselves to rote memorization for example.

Durable probably, but there are no guarantee it doesn't change a step at a time...