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.