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Did Australian Aborigines Preserve a Memory of a Volcanic Eruption for 7,000 Years?

5/5/2017

16 Comments

 
​The Australian edition of National Geographic carries a rather grandiose claim that an Aboriginal tribe in Australia accurately preserved the memory of the eruption of a local volcano for 230 generations spanning 7,000 years. This article is one of dozens that appeared in Australian and British media in the last few days after the University of Glasgow issued a press release on the subject last Friday. It would be wonderful if this were true, but the article left me feeling uneasy, not least because the story in question was first recorded in 1970, some 6,900+ years after the fact, and long after most members of the Gugu Badhun would have been familiar enough with volcanism that Western education could conceivably have influenced any story told at that time. Indeed, by 1970, the Gugu Badhun language was dying, and a linguist studying them at the time found no fluent speakers of the language and only a dozen or so partial speakers.
​Just for the fun of it: As I worked on this story last night and this morning, I lost access to all Australian government websites on my laptop due to some unspecified connection issue, though my smartphone connected just fine. The Down for Everyone website informs me that the connection issue is not just me. It made it a little difficult to research Australian resources, so some of the links are to Google caches. Sorry about that.
 
Let’s back up and take a look at the claim. According to National Geographic, Dr. Benjamin Cohen of the University of Glasgow, made the claim in an academic article about Kinrara, an extinct volcano in northeastern Australia currently represented by a water-filled crater. Here is how National Geographic summarized the story:
The Gugu Badhun people have been retelling the story of a huge explosion that rocked the Australian landscape for 230 generations. After new evidence, experts believe the 7,000-year-old epic is true.
 
The epic tells the story of a large explosion that created a massive crater in the ground. The explosion or eruption filled the air with a thick dust, the air turned hot, and fire ran along the river.
​As we shall see, pretty much nothing in the above quotation is actually true.
 
Here is where the circular reasoning comes into play: Cohen claims that the above story is 7,000 years old because he has dated the volcano’s last eruption to 7,000 years ago (plus or minus 2,000 years), which he calculated as being 230 +/- 70 generations ago. The National Geographic writer then claimed that the 5000 BCE date for the story was a given that confirmed the date of the eruption.
 
Obviously, I wanted to know more, so I looked up the original academic paper. Cohen wrote the piece with three coauthors, and it’s entitled “Holocene-Neogene Volcanism in Northeastern Australia: Chronology and Eruption History.” It was published this April in Quaternary Geochronology after being published electronically back in January, and fortunately the full text is available in my local university library’s online databases. (Thanks, EBSCO!) As the journal title implies, Cohen and his colleagues are geologists and not anthropologists. The purpose of the article was to date the eruptions of the Kinara volcano, not to establish Aboriginal knowledge of it.
 
It is not inconceivable that the story goes back that far since other studies have suggested that Aboriginal people preserve memories of the Ice Age coastlines of Australia. However, the fact that this story was first recorded in the 1970s and doesn’t seem to show any details that couldn’t have been gleaned from basic science and disaster movies leaves me a bit uneasy. I’d want to see the methodology that helps to establish why this story is genuinely ancient, but the article doesn’t seem too helpful on the that point, starting from the premise that the story is old and applying it from there: “Verbal traditions of the Gugu Badhun Aboriginal people contain features that may potentially describe the eruption of Kinrara. If the traditions do record this eruption, they would have been passed down for 230 ± 70 generations – a period of time exceeding the earliest written historical records.” This apparently gave them little pause. They offered the usual qualifications, but did not go beyond them. Just wait until you see the actual stories that they elided into this supposedly genuine account.
 
Here are our authors confessing that the “epic” described above is actually a conflation of two separate and seemingly unrelated stories:
One Gugu Badhun tradition recounts the earth being on fire along the watercourses, while a second tradition tells of a time when a witch-doctor made a pit in the ground and lots of dust in the air; people got lost in the dust, and died (Hoolihan and Sutton, 1970). We speculate that these features could be consistent with the geology of Kinrara, which erupted from a crater (Fig. 3e), with ash-rich explosive activity, lava fountaining, and pyroclastic eruptions (Stanton, 1993). The mention of people dying in the dust (potentially volcanic ash) may be significant.
​This assumes quite a bit, and I am dumbfounded how National Geographic developed an “epic” about an “explosion” from these sentences. The reporter was careless at best.
 
Note that these are two separate events, one describing a fire and the other a dust storm. (Presumably, having experienced bushfires, Aborigines know the difference between dust and smoke.) The stories are seemingly unconnected, and the entire interpretation rests on the question of whether the “pit” in the ground is the caldera left by the volcano 7,000 years ago. It is unclear why a forest fire that followed the path of rivers—where trees and plants are thickest—should be uniquely volcanic; or, frankly, why we should assume that an apparently poetic reversal of the elements—water into fire—should be taken as a true-life account. The authors answer that “severe bushfires or dust storms would not be restricted to a single pit or just the watercourses.” And yet, myths need not follow the logic of reality, especially if you have given yourself license to abandon parts of the story in order to fit it to a preconceived narrative. Beyond this, there is no reason given to connect these two mythic events, which need not be assumed to have a factual foundation. Why do we get to put together two different stories and claim they are part of one volcanic eruption?
 
I wish I could offer a greater analysis of the underlying stories, but they are not found in published accounts. The citation leads to tape recordings produced in 1970 by Peter Sutton, then a graduate student working on a Master’s thesis on the Gugu Badhun language. The tapes are held in an Australian library and not accessible to me, and the account does not seem to appear in Sutton’s thesis. I know from that thesis and Cohen et al.’s citation, however, that the stories excerpted for the article were told by Richard Hoolihan, a Gugu Badhun with partial knowledge of the ancient tongue. Based on the library catalog entries for the two separate tapes Cohen et al. cite (tapes 70/2 and 70/10), I know that the two stories come from discussions separated by two weeks: a January 7, 1970 discussion of “the conflict between the Pheasant and Bronzewing Pigeon, told in English by Richard Hoolihan” and a January 24, 1970 story with the clearly anachronistic title “How the Lava Came to Be,” another English-language myth. The very use of the word “lava” by Hoolihan shows that he or Sutton was imposing Western vocabulary, categories, and knowledge onto the narrative since, as Cohen et al. make clear, there was no lava to give name to in Queensland, where there were no active volcanoes in historic times. For Hoolihan to tell the story of lava, he must have run whatever the older narrative layer was through a Western framework. Tellingly, “lava” does not appear in Sutton’s dictionary of Gugu Badhun vocabulary.
 
The long and short of it is that Cohen and his colleagues concocted their own story from two separate ones, assumed it was ancient, left out important qualifiers that cast doubt on the antiquity of the underlying narratives, and then tried to match it to events on the ground. 
16 Comments
orang
5/5/2017 10:31:44 am

National Geographic has deteriorated in the last couple of decades. They occasionally do sloppy, lazy and inconsistent research/vetting much like various TV channels such as TLC, History, etc. It happens often enough so that you can't trust what they conclude. I guess it's so that they can provide a sensational "hook" to nab readers/watcher. I don't expect them to improve, however, due to their new owner, R. Murdoch, although this deterioration started before he owned them.

Reply
Only Me
5/5/2017 10:47:41 am

This makes me wonder what the potential is for the fringe community to pick up this story, accept it as true and repeat it whenever it's needed to support an idea.

An even better question is why an editor would allow an article to proclaim a myth as true when the article itself reveals the myth requires accepting two separate stories as individual parts to one greater story, massaged to fit a geological study.

Reply
Ken
5/5/2017 11:30:47 am

I'm not sure the second quotation above is an irresponsible statement since it A) admits that it is speculation, and B) uses ultra conservative language, including 'consistent with...' and 'may be significant.'

It certainly seems to be a reasonable speculation, given the few bits of evidence they do have.

NatGeo may be over-dramatizing, but the essence is definitely possible, if not the best explanation.

Reply
Bob Jase
5/5/2017 01:07:59 pm

So the Gugu Badhun have lived in this one spot for the past 7000 years? Unlike every other tribe on earth that has wandered around this one bunch sat down 7000 years ago and stayed put?

yeah

"We speculate that these features could be consistent with the geology of Kinrara"

Or they could be about something else entirrely like, maybe, what the stories say they're about? Like a fire along a riverbank and a fire pit that got out of control?

Reply
Americanegro
5/5/2017 10:42:22 pm

Care to explain where Africans migrated from?

Reply
Crash55
5/6/2017 02:07:32 pm

Other parts of Africa. Tribes move for lots of reasons, especially prior to adopting agriculture.

The archaeological record should show whether they stayed put or moved. If they can't trace continuous habitation to the region near the lake /caldera then it would cast doubt on the veracity of the story

Americanegro
5/6/2017 07:30:35 pm

I'm filing that under "sez you". "Other parts of Africa"? Define Africa. How do you migrate from Africa to Africa? It's like saying if someone moves from the driver's seat to the passenger seat that's a migration.

Crash55
5/9/2017 01:07:53 pm

Africa as in the continent. Not exactly a small place. Humans originated in the Great Rift Valley so any tribes outside of their obviously migrated. Going from the Great Rift Valley to West Africa is very different from going from the driver's to the passengers seat.

Also tribes would have been displaced do to conflicts and environmental changes. Prior to agriculture there was no incentive to stay in one location

Denis Gojak
5/8/2017 03:53:23 am

"So the Gugu Badhun have lived in this one spot for the past 7000 years? Unlike every other tribe on earth that has wandered around this one bunch sat down 7000 years ago and stayed put?

yeah"

Well done Bob, it seems 'yeah' is is the correct answer.

A new study on indigenous Australian DNA was released in March, which shows that, after the initial settlement of Australia ~60-50,000 years ago, not only was there negligible contribution from later populations but also an unexpected continuity of regional occupation within different parts of the Australian continent.

While anywhere a 7,000 year continuity has to be looked at skeptically, this suggests it was potentially possible here, even if nowhere else on the planet.

Good overview article here - https://theconversation.com/dna-reveals-aboriginal-people-had-a-long-and-settled-connection-to-country-73958

Version of Nature article here - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/314306369_Aboriginal_mitogenomes_reveal_50000_years_of_regionalism_in_Australia

One thing missing from Jason's usually eagle-eyed scrutiny in this matter is that a lot of Aboriginal traditional lore, and the means by which stories got handed down was designed to retain knowledge of long-term environmental change. Most of Australia is not climatically seasonal, so things critical for survival, like distinguishing between the start of a rainy period and a wet weekend, which are important if you want to head into an arid area, are based on mnemonic structures, including Dreamtime stories that preserve environmental information. A bit like the [?apocryphal] story of the Andamanese who knew from traditional lore that a particular change in coastal swells was a signal to drop everything and clear out.

A recent book by Lynne Kelly, The memory code, is a good overview of the Aboriginal mnemonic system, and she tries to apply it to other notable archaeological landscapes. Despite the strongly new-agey design of the cover its a pretty solid work.

Jason picks the obvious holes in this one, and I think its reasonable to be very cautious about accepting claims for any narrative over such a time period. But, one of the nice things about being human is allowing ourselves to be genuinely surprised and happy when something happens that we were certain was never, ever, ever going to take place.

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flip
5/5/2017 08:15:26 pm

I'd offer to check these tapes/transcripts out as a local (Australian), but sadly the library is not in my state. Pity they don't have it digitised either...

"a January 24, 1970 story with the clearly anachronistic title “How the Lava Came to Be,” another English-language myth"

Sounds to me like they were collecting Dreamtime myths which had been muddled with newer Judeo-Christian stuff, no different than any other tainted native story coming from the US and other colonised places.

Reply
David Bradbury
5/6/2017 02:40:42 pm

Oddly, it looks as if the 1970 recordings were almost the first recognition that the Gugu Badhun / Koko Badun existed as a separate cultural entity, which doesn't help matters at all.

Reply
Crash55
5/6/2017 02:10:32 pm

I don't blame the paper's authors but rather Nat Geo. The paper was about the volcano's eruption date correct? If so then the stories are just an aside they threw in to make the paper more interesting. Nat Geo is at fault for taking a geology paper and drawing anthropology conclusions from it.

Reply
Kal
5/7/2017 05:42:32 pm

I assume the Australian geologists have dated any possible volcanoes on the island and know full well when the last one went off.

Or they are fans of Xenu and his volcano soul gods after our gold. Ha.

Not sure what this proves. So what if someone in 1970 conflated something in an old myth. It doesn't change the world for the Aborigines. Criky.

They had no word of kangaroo either. To them it was 'I don't know what you're saying'.

Reply
Finn
5/8/2017 12:38:23 am

I can only think that "fire running along the river" *could* be a description of streams of lava, which is a stream of fire, so to speak. This in turn would explain the forests burning, as the lava cut a path through any bushland.

This is entirely conjectural though, and by no means am I trying to verify the original claim.

Reply
flip
5/9/2017 04:09:28 am

It 'could' be lava, but the more probable explanation of it is bushfire, simply because bushfires are far more common in Australia, especially during the dry summer seasons. Plus, the whole Occam's razor thing, wherein bushfire is the simplest explanation for... bushfire.

Reply
V
5/14/2017 03:08:42 pm

When the Hudson caught fire, it wasn't a volcanic eruption. I'm not saying that "fire running along the rivers" in this case was "the river was so polluted with industrial filth that it caught fire," just pointing out that there is more than one possible way for something to be a "stream of fire."

Anyone who's ever cooked with real fire (as opposed to electric ranges) has seen a tiny stream of fire when a run of grease catches fire. Human beings are very, very good at "what if?", so it wouldn't take much to blow that up into "what if that happened to the rivers?" and give you a nice disaster story. It's also possible for debris to so choke a watercourse during a brush fire that the water itself appears to be on fire. Hell, this past weekend, I got to see a swamp fire. Most of what I saw PERSONALLY was the kind of thing that makes lovely "omen" stories, like the sky turning black at noon and the sun turning the color of blood. (Yes. It was bright blood red, thanks to the smoke in the air.) There were photographs and short video clips of the fire itself, or possibly of another fire--I didn't have the sound up on the tv--that showed it really looking like a lake being on fire, because the vegetation sticking up OUT of the swamp was lit. I've seen other footage before of forest fires that gives the same visual effect--of water being on fire. It COULD be a description of lava...but we KNOW they lived through brush fires fairly regularly, so that's honestly a more likely explanation.

As for the pit and the witch doctor, I kind of think it sounds more like an origins story--kind of like "when he struck the rock with the blade, a river poured out, and that's how we have X river" or "he smashed the monster to the ground so hard it shattered into millions of tiny monsters, and that's why we have such a mosquito problem now." (A genuine Native American tale from my area, btw.) I think that if the dust storm were connected to the fire, it would be more clear--if it's a verbal history, why didn't the witch-doctor cause the fire, too? Or why isn't it more "and in the wake of the great fire, huge amounts of dust rose, and people got lost in it and died"? The way they're worded makes them LESS likely to be connected, IMO. I mean, no, I'm not an anthropologist, nor a literary scholar, but I'm fairly knowledgeable about mythology from around the world (not all by ANY means!) and stuff like this tends to be fairly consistent across cultures.

I mean, it COULD be lost. It could be just that we don't have the fragment that says, "in the wake of the huge fire, people blamed the witch doctor," or "The witch-doctor was angry, so first he ___ and then he ___." It's POSSIBLE. It just doesn't seem that likely...

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