Oral History and The Lost City of Z

I just finished reading a book called Lost City of Z. This is a fascinating tale about an explorer named Percy Fawcett that disappeared into the Amazon in the late 1920s looking for a lost city that he believed was in the unexplored regions of the upper Amazon River.

The author attempts to find the trail and determine what happened to Fawcett. In the course of tracking his last known locations, he talked to an Indian that remembered a story about the explorer travelling through their village. His story was from three generations before and he remembered it because his parents and grandparents had come up with a story that sounded like a poem or a song.

In another part of the book, there is an account of another explorer's story of his travels. This story changed with each retelling. It makes you wonder how accurate stories are. We are conditioned to believe that true human history started when man started writing things down. Before that time, there was only oral history, which was subject to change and erosion as the generations passed.

However, it occurs to me that oral history must be good for some learning and provide a measure of continuity. Otherwise we'd all be stupid, inexperienced primitives trying to figure out basic survival skills with each new generation.

If you think about how older people tell their stories over and over, you realize that eventually you remember them yourselves. How many times have you heard the same story from your parents or grandparents until you think you could tell it yourself? This must be an ingrained way that humans pass on their history.

Religious history is the same way. It starts as an oral tradition, changing over time with each generation retelling the story. Still, something of the original story remains, only the exact details and origin of the story fade into history until the story becomes purely mythical, with it's factual origins lost in obscurity. The trick is to see if you can figure out what kernel of truth remains in the story after so many retellings, and what you can really learn from it.

The book had an interesting ending. Our poor lost explorer remained a mystery, but what he was looking for was found by a modern explorer that the author found in the jungle. The cities may not have been the huge sprawling metropolises that Fawcett imagined, and they were not from the 1600s or 1700s, as he hoped, but the true solved mystery is even more important and fascinating than what he imagined.