When Europeans colonized Australia 250 years ago, the continent was home to an estimated half-million to 2 million people who were organized into about 700 different groups and spoke at least 250 languages.

The idea that 300 generations could faithfully tell a story that didn’t degenerate into Chinese whispers, that was passing on factual information that we know happened from independent chronology, that just seems too good to be true, right?

It’s an extraordinary thing. We don’t find this in other places around the world. The sea being 120 metres lower and then coming up over the continental shelf, that happened in Africa, America, Asia and everywhere else. But it’s only in Australia that we’re finding this large canon of stories that are all faithfully telling the same thing.

University of New England linguist Nicholas Reid

Our sense originally is that the sea level must have been creeping up very slowly and not been noticeable in an individual’s lifetime. But we’ve come to realise through conducting this research that Australia must in fact have been abuzz with news about this. There must have been constant inland movement, re-establishing relationships with country, negotiating with inland neighbours about encroaching onto their territory. There would have been massive ramifications of this.

University of New England linguist Nicholas Reid

When you have three generations constantly in the know, and tasked with checking as a cultural responsibility, that creates the kind of mechanism that could explain why [Aboriginal Australians] seem to have done something that hasn’t been achieved elsewhere in the world: accurately telling stories for 10,000 years.

University of New England linguist Nicholas Reid