Not to mention it's hard to have anything other than oral tradition. No way to write anything down. I remember someone talking about how octopodes and parrots are both incredibly clever, but they don't have any real way of transferring knowledge between generations, so each one must relearn the same stuff. And squids only live like 8 years or so, which don't help either.
I think orcas transfer knowledge? This is not at all my area of expertise, but I know different pods will have different ways of hunting the same prey + fashion fads and other stuff. But they don't have any sort of permanent record, which must be sucky.

[–] mar_k@hexbear.net 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

Oral tradition can be incredibly rich. Most civilizations in human history had no written language, until very recently. Only a few human cultures created written languages independently (Egyptians, Sudanese, Chinese, Iraqis, and a couple others). Mythology and epics from Ancient Greece, including Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, were complicated stories passed exclusively by word of mouth from traveling poets. And oral wisdom + verbatim memory were incredibly valued and highly trained skills, so these stories might not have been as distorted across generations as we might assume

We already know orcas spend their entire lives by the sides of the same group, and that the matriarch leader does in fact pass customs, culture, and practices to the next generations by word of mouth. And they likely have greater brainpower for remembrance than us, so who knows, the matriarchs could have books worth of knowledge all in their heads. (And yea parrots and octopus are smart but definitely not on the level of orcas)

[–] ComradeRat@hexbear.net 1 points 1 day ago

There's actually some archaeologists/historians who argue early Chinese characters show influence from Cuneiform, and that both show simularities to neolithic protowriting systems in some of their symbols. Unfortunately they publish in french so i cant read their shit yet

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2520385123?url_ver=Z39.88-2003&rfr_id=ori%3Arid%3Acrossref.org&rfr_dat=cr_pub++0pubmed

Theres also evidence (discussed in above article) that huntergatherers in Europe 40k years ago had a protowriting system as complicated as the very, very early cuneiform writings.

[–] BanMeFromPosting@hexbear.net 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

I get kind of annoyed at how often communication on this site requires a person to cover every single possible thing that could be even somewhat related to what you're saying.
When I'm saying "they don't have a way of writing things down, they only have oral tradition" I am not saying "oral tradition bad" or "oral tradition not a useful method of giving on knawledge" - I even mention that Orcas DO pass on knowledge!
What I am saying is that "writing things down is pretty good for passing on knowledge and storing knowledge that isn't initially useful in a way that oral tradition can't". Oral tradition is rich and yadda yadda. It does not allow for long-term storage in the same way that written language.
Now I will get ahead of yet another thing I didn't write: Written language also has issues and is also not a perfect method of storage or anything. But it opens avenues oral tradition doesn't.

They don't have any sort of permanent record, which must be sucky

This is so tiring.

[–] mar_k@hexbear.net 3 points 1 day ago

I wasn't arguing with anything you said, just adding on stuff I find fascinating, like the possibility that even without that tangible record they perhaps have passed complex information across centuries or even millenniums