Well, you seem to have provided your own cite, so why ask me?
But consider this. How would anyone, in preliterate times, have been able to tell if a bard was reciting the same long poem word-for-word exactly the same every time (or exactly the same as the bard in the next village)? How could even the bard himself know this? In fact they could not possibly know if they were getting it exactly “right,” and there is consequently no reason to think that they did achieve such an extraordinary feat. They told their stories well enough to keep their audiences interested, and accurately enough to avoid the audience protesting that they were getting the story wrong. Compared to reproducing the poem with word-for-word exactitude every time, that is a relatively easy task. Why even try to achieve the much more difficult task when no-one, including yourself, can possibly know whether you have succeeded.
Not at all. Not even sure why “preliterate” is relevant. It just sounds like normal human capability.
A group of people in any specific environment will have capabilities specific to that environment that far exceed those in different environments. It’s why Eskimos have so many gradations of snow, the level of detail they detect is due to prolonged exposure to that environment.
barcus and njtt (in your eidetic imagery post), you both seem to be making similar points.
I merely offer anecdotes: each of kids was able to beat the pants off me at those Concentration memory games up to about 4th grade, and then they became as bad at it as I am or worse, losing horribly to their next younger sibling.
Developing the tactic/ability to use categorization seems to displace the tactic/ability of memorizing the complete image in all its detail both in ontogeny and in phylogeny.
But it’s not clear from your quote that they are talking about the ability to accumulate lots of knowledge during your lifetime or the ability to accumulate a lot of knowledge about your natural environment during your lifetime. We literates accumulate vast amounts of knowledge about our “unnatural” environment. I’d pit any die-hard sports fan against a hunter gatherer any day.
In mid years, I would crush my nieces and nephews of elementary school level in “concentration” type games. Now, as a geezer, I hand out the same punishment to my grand children. “Steve, you should let them win once and while” says the wife. Bah, it’s a point of honor. And I am not illlllit-er, ilerate, ill…, dum!