The crucial art of telling your story

“It’s quite gobsmacking to think that a story could be told for 10,000 years.” Professor Nicholas Read

Storytelling is literally as old as time. And the people telling those stories were around long before historians. Nicholas Read studies indigenous Australian languages at the University of New England in Australia. In this fascinating article by Scientific American he says, “It’s almost unimaginable that people would transmit stories about things like islands that are currently underwater.” And that these have been recounted, “accurately across 400 generations.”

He thinks endangered indigenous languages are sources of, “factual knowledge across time depths far greater than previously imagined.” Incredibly some of these stories are 12,600 years old, recounting floods and seas that were 30 feet higher than today. Information conveyed through the power of speech alone. There’s no writing, no technology. No data capture.

Storytelling is in our DNA. In her BBC documentary ‘Almost Australian,’ Miriam Margolyes says, “Stories are, and always have been, a way of explaining life to people.” She thinks telling them and listening to them is a human need. “First Nation people have been telling stories for thousands of years. And their stories explain the world. Generation…