Before the popularization of writing system, oral (or "preliterate") societies maintained historical records that spanned millennia through storytelling.

In the Scottish Isles, locals describe how rising sea levels divided one island into two 7,000 years ago. Indigenous storytellers in Australia, Fiji, and America that can describe volcanic eruptions that happened up to 9,000 years ago. Indigenous people in Tasmania can tell you the specific location of a southern star that last appeared in the sky more than 10,000 years ago.

These are all examples of momentous events corroborated by science, but oral history also preserves more routine records: ancestry, relationships, weather, and food. Scientist Patrick Nunn says that oral societies can carry knowledge coherently for hundreds of generations.

Compare that to your own family's oral history. Do you know your grandparents' stories? Your great grandparents' stories?

Our modern world accepts the virtue of literacy as a foregone conclusion. So, a discussion of literary and oral societies raises questions about the drawbacks of literacy. The ancient philosophers debated the virtue of reading and writing, arguing that writing diminishes the skill of memory and externalizes knowledge. Oral records live in the form of wisdom, while written records are lifeless information. More recently, the philosopher Walter Ong has said that "Those who use writing will become forgetful, relying on an external resource for what they lack in internal resources."

Today we repeat the same debate in conversations about Google and ChatGPT. Do these tools weaken our innate intelligence?

I'm inclined to see it the other way. Oral societies demonstrate the potential of the human mind. We have the capacity to hold profound, detailed, and creative knowledge within ourselves. When provided with a textbook for an open-book exam, we'll learn to find information efficiently. But when placed in a foreign country where we don't know the language, we'll study the environment and memorize details to navigate new terrain. We adapt to our context, whether that context is comfortable or challenging. Knowing how powerful the mind is, how do we want to use it?