Actually, use “rainbow serpent” instead.
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/tv/explorer/exp071402.html
I got to attend one of his lectures, and his slideshow and anecdotes were fascinating even though I have a phobia of snakes.
Oh- reason I posted that- it wasn’t a hijack. Means’ quest was to prove the origin of the Rainbow Serpent legend in fact.
As a matter of fact, they do, up here. According to local sources, the last mammoths were butchered for meat around a hundred and change years ago. Seems to have been reported by both Gwich’in and Tutchone peoples, and there are several recountings of this sort in the early newspapers (Klondike Daily Nugget, 1899-1904 issues, whatever the heck the Fairbanks paper was called, and a couple other papers local to the North.)
They were reputed to be very tasty. 
But these were frozen-fossil mammoths, no?
Are there any “dreamtime” legends of giant lizards or dragons? At the time the Australian aborigines arrived, I believe there were still giant monitor lizards in Australia. HUGE ones. Do they survive in legend?
(Though I guess it might be hard to separate crocodiles from giant lizards in ancient lore.)
**
Though Bigfoot is certainly a hoax, there are Indian legends of giant, furry woodland creatures. Those legends have been used as support for Bigfoot believers, but might in fact be derived from ancient oral legends of the giant ground sloth. If so, those legends would be around 11,000 years old, dating to the time before the giant sloth became extinct.
As far as ancient legends of the Near East go, aren’t some of the elements of the story of Moses supposed to be very old. In particular, the idea of placing an infant in a basket in a river shows up in the Moses legend, the legend of Gilgamesh, and the legend of Romulus and Remus.
Nope.
Chase 'em down and kill 'em type legends.
According to the sense of the legends I’ve heard, they were not common, but eagerly hunted when they were found.
I’m inclined to think that people are missing the point of this particular question when they include ‘Gilgamesh’ and ‘Flood’ stories as part of ‘Oral tradition’. Having the stories written down and then picked up again by future cultures doesn’t really seem ‘Oral’ to me at all. And I don’t get the sense that there are too many Sumerian storytellers kicking around lately.
Certainly there is merit to the idea of very ancient Australian Aboriginal tales that are actually still circulating by word of mouth.
On this side of the world I’ve heard tell that the tradition of the Finnish Kalevala is likely thousands of years old…and legitimately so, passed on from Rune singer to Rune singer over ensuing millenia.
You’re right, CaptEgo, I’m familiar enough with the Greek legends and Gilgamesh, and didn’t really count those, since it seems more likely to me that their stories have survived longer as written traditions, than as oral ones. In going over my copy of T. W. Doane’s Bible Myths and Their Parallels in Other Religions today, I came across this rather interesting passage:
Which seems to indicate that in many societies, their creation myth is dated to the period of time when they stopped being a hunter/gatherer tribe, and settled down as farmers. I don’t know the date at which time the group he mentions became farmers (though, it should be possible to do so through archelogical means), but that would enable one to pin down an approximate date for the events. I doubt, however, that these tales could be older than the mammoth hunting ones mentioned earlier.
I wonder if any of the native languages in your area have words for ‘mammoth’?
I believed it had been compilated and rewritten quite recently…like during the XIX° century?
This post is more in reply to the Flood-related posts.
I have absolutely no cite for this, but I had a college physics teacher who referenced some very reasonable-sounding theory that the biblical flood was a myth that originated with the Mediterranean.
The story was that there was some sort of proof that the water level in the Med. used to be substantially lower (I believe there actually were/are submerged cities/countries off the coast of Egypt, I think they’ve found ruins). Apparently, the theory is that at one time the Strait of Gibraltar was in fact an intact wall across the mouth of the Med., and there was a substantial difference in the water levels between the Med. and the Atlantic. Some seismic event supposedly ruptured the barrier and the resulting global adjustment in water level resulted in a flood of the whole Med. basin area.
Anybody else heard this? Sorry for being so vague.
You may be thinking about the supposed Black Sea flood.
“No shit, there Og was. Threw rock, hit mammoth, mammoth died. Eat for weeks.”
Actually, I have heard of the theory of which // \etalhea| speaks. I do not know how credible it is, but I have heard it, and sadly, like him, I cannot provide a source.
The written version was indeed collected and compiled by Elias Lönnrot in the 1830 and 40’s. But that was just for the purpose of getting a written record of the matter. The reason I brought it up however is the fact that there are still active Finnish ‘Rune Singers’ who continue to pass on the knowledge to each other orally. They don’t pop over to the library for refreshers about the cycles but simply ‘tell’ the next generation about it. Lönnrot’s archiving of the Kalevala has not interefered with an unbroken lineage of Oral teaching and learning.
Supposedly. I couldn’t possibly tell you what they were at the moment, though. I believe the Gwich’in do, and the Southern Tutchone/Tlingit have one as well. The actual words used were not given in the books I was reading, and I think only one of them provided an approximate translation.
To return from the slight hijack, I would be most interested in learning the Kalevala properly. S’pose one would have to learn Finnish first, though.
The oral history of the First Nations in the Yukon has been somewhat preserved - better than further south, as we still had our traditional elders at a time when the southern tribes had lost theirs three and four generations ago. During the first real “Aboriginal America Revival”, one of the first waves of cultural anthropologists armed with tape recorders was aimed at us.
Thank heavens. We managed to decant part of the elder’s knowledge to tape before they passed on. Some, we got an almost complete collection of every story they had to tell. There’s a really neat one about giant beavers, and why they no longer exist. Interestingly enough, one of the more common Ice Age fossils we have up here is that of the giant beaver.
And, just as an FYI, some of you might want to check out the Yukon International Storytelling Festival.
You’d be surprised!
In the late 19th century, the Gilgamesh legend was still being told as oral tradition in the Caucasus. Gurdjieff (1874-1949), born in Armenia, was the son of a traditional bard who recited the epic of Gilgamesh from memory and taught it to young Gurdjieff. About 1915, the Sumerian tablets of Gilgamesh were discovered and published. When Gurdjieff read the text and recognized it as the traditional oral epic his father had taught him, he was astonished and set out to investigate archaeology.
DRomm, good call on the Sumerian Eve-rib connection. Actually, the name Eve in Hebrew (Havvah) means ‘she who makes live’, to link up with the Sumerian pun on the word ti. Cecil has covered this in a Straight Dope column…
http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a1_095b.html
My candidate for oldest continuous oral tradition stretches from the Neolithic to Shakespeare. The book Hamlet’s Mill by Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend uses paleoastronomy to find patterns of the precession of the equinoxes from the time of the ice ages in old legends.
The mythical Amloði or Amleth (the original form of Hamlet), in ancient Norse legend, had a miraculous mill. In ancient times it ground out peace and plenty, but later times it was “broken” and then ground out only rock into sand, and salt. This explains the origin of the sand on the seashore and why the sea is salt. The mill being broken causes Hamlet’s madness and the drowning of his girlfriend. Many of the ancient mythic elements of the tale went into the medieval version by Saxo Grammaticus, which Shakespeare drew upon.
The Kalevala preserved some of this myth, too, in the stories of the magical Sampo. The Sampo was a mill that was stolen and had to be regained. (Cecelia Holland’s prehistoric novel Pillar of the Sky, about the building of Stonehenge, also included a mill called the Sampo which was the metaphor for the cyclical grinding of time and fate: the wheel of the sky always turning around. As the women turned the Sampo while grinding, they sang songs commenting on cyclical time and the rise and fall of human fortunes, like a Greek chorus.)
De Santillana and von Dechend, historians of science, identified the “breaking of the mill” as the precession of the equinoxes. Something that wasn’t supposed to have been discovered until the the 2nd century BC by the Greek astronomer Hipparchus. But the Neolithic peoples who made these old tales were aware of it; they put it into their sung epics so that the knowledge would be passed down in the form of folk tales. For prehistoric astronomers to have known about the precession of equinoxes, they would have had to have passed down oral lore continuously over several thousand years. Myths like Hamlet’s Mill carried the astronomical knowledge in a form that would ensure its perpetuation. The numbers associated with the ending of world, as recorded in the Icelandic Eddas, are identical to the numbers used in Hindu World Age calculations, and both ultimately refer to precession.
The authors found the themes of Hamlet’s Mill in many ancient legends around the world. There were survivals of it in Rome (the legend of Lucius Junius Brutus), in Persia (the story of Kai Khusrau in the Shâhnâmah), and the Sanskrit lore of the Bhagavata Purana: “…the exalted seat of Vishnu, round which the starry spheres forever wander, like the upright axle of the corn mill…”
In the 2nd-century AD, the Greek Cleomedes said of the northern latitudes: “The heavens there turn around in the way a millstone does.” As told by the medieval Central Asian scholar al-Farghani, the “Mill Peg,” the star Kochab ([symbol]b[/symbol] Ursa Minoris) had become broken loose, causing the cosmic mill to wobble and the polar axis to become tilted. As a result of this “tilt,” the spinning earth wobbles like a huge top, and the pole over a period of some 25,800 years traces a great circle, causing the equinoxes to precess through each of the twelve signs of the zodiac at a rate of about one sign every 2,100 years. Each sign has 30 degrees. The Player King in Hamlet says:
"About the world have times twelve thirties been"
But there’s something you didn’t take into account—internal evidence in the myth that links to external evidence that correlates with chronology.
In the case of Hamlet’s Mill, de Santillana and von Dechend were able to date the age of the legend with paleoastronomy. The specific era was some 6,500 years ago when the position of the equinoctial sun was aligned with the band of the Milky Way. This provided an obvious celestial alignment, occurring twice a year on the equinoxes, when the sun would conjunct the Milky Way (the Bridge Out of Time) opening the way out of the plane of the living (the Zodiac) and up to the cosmic center and source in heaven. A “breaking asunder” occurred when this great cosmogonic picture began to precess out of alignment.