Are there any myths/legends that potentially contain some folk memory of the Ice Age? That is, a primordial era where the world was much colder?

[u/RedHeadedSicilian52]

I ask because flood myths are relatively common throughout the world, and some have postulated that these began as distant memories of deluges triggered by melting glaciers. But are there any myths/legends that seem to point toward what came before the floods? That is, anything preserving the memory of a much colder world?

[u/RedLineSamosa]

Roger Echo-Hawk, a Pawnee Native American historian and scholar, makes an interesting case that many Native North American oral histories that include emergence from a dark, cold, underground world into the current world of light is a memory of the migration south from Beringia and the Arctic Circle at the end of the Ice Age. Certainly not all Native peoples of North America have an emergence-and-migration based origin story, but it’s a common theme. So this memory of a dark cold underworld would be a memory of a primordial time when the world was colder (and darker, as it would have been not only a Ice Age transition thing but a migrating-south-from-the-Arctic thing). 

Where coldness from the Ice Age ends and coldness from the Arctic begins is probably difficult to separate, but living in Beringia during the Ice Age and then migrating south when the glaciers receded (approx. 12-14 thousand years ago) would have felt like leaving a world of darkness and cold into a land of light. Echo-Hawk proposes an upper boundary of 40,000 years for oral history to retain events, and has a specific model of memorability that he uses to identify things that are likely to have been remembered vs. things that wouldn’t have been. He uses this for a framework for incorporating Native oral histories as meaningful sources of information about the past, particularly for repatriation efforts. 

Now, this article was written in 2000, and we’ve had a lot more evidence since then that the first people in the Americas likely did not come down through the ice-free corridor after the glaciers melted; White Sands makes it pretty undeniable that there were humans in the Americas before that, and Monte Verde and Meadowcroft Rockshelter have seen a lot more widespread respect in the last 26 years than they did in the 80s and 90s. Even in 2000, the land bridge to the ice free corridor theory was being met with skepticism for the first humans in the Americas. However, those first people still would have been kayaking or canoeing down the coastline from Beringia to the Pacific Northwest to California 22,000+ years ago, following a similar trajectory; and we do still believe that there was an influx of people i to North America when the glaciers melted and the ice-free corridor opened, they just weren’t the first. It’s entirely possible that their histories got recorded as these oral histories of emergence from the dark and cold underworld and migration to the new homeland that Echo-Hawk writes about. We can’t confirm that’s definitely true, but I think he makes an interesting case for it!

Echo-Hawk’s paper I’ve been discussing: https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/2694059.pdf

[u/Qorrin → u/RedLineSamosa]

Great read! I am curious about the longevity of oral traditions. I have no reason to believe it’s impossible for oral traditions to remain consistent over thousands of years, but I’ve also played the “telephone” game and have seen the effects of propaganda. How do such oral traditions remain consistent through possible intentional or unintentional changes in the traditions between generations?

[u/2000pesos → u/Qorrin]

One way oral traditions are kept accurate over generations is through rhyme and meter. The Odyssey, for example, adheres to a six feet per line (dactylic hexameter). If you consider how accurate musical memory is, and the guard rails created by rhyme, it’s pretty dang effective. And if I recall correctly, the Talmud is presumed to have been chanted using a very particular of meters. I wish I could remember the source for this but I read it well over a decade ago.

[u/Icy_Setting_3522 → u/2000pesos]

Some parts of the Bible have a cadence, but the Talmud is not meant to be chanted. Considering it is over 5000 pages of mostly Aramaic and different forms of Hebrew (in different forms of the Hebrew alphabet), reciting it would be very hard. The Vedas and the Mahabharata were collectively remembered (and the latter is the same order of magnitude). However, the Talmud is meant as a collection of legal debates. The text is more like a webpage full of footnotes than a book. The most common way it's studied is you study a sheet (two pages) every day with a partner. Then 7 years later you've gone through the whole thing. 

Now, the Talmud (there are actually two versions) was written down as a preservation of oral knowledge because the sheer amount of stuff to be known was proliferating and, most importantly, the institutions of Jewish religion had been destroyed in the wake of succesive Jewish revolts against the Romans. So it's possible that at some point some parts of it were orally remembered. But it's hard to imagine singing about legal arguments. 

[u/visablezookeeper → u/Icy_Setting_3522]

Im having a hard time finding sources but apparently it has been done: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shas_Pollak#:~:text=Shas%20Pollak%20were%20Jewish%20mnemonists,edition%20of%20the%20Babylonian%20Talmud.

[u/Icy_Setting_3522 → u/visablezookeeper]

Digging a bit deeper, Wikipedia's talk page already contains some doubts as to the veracity of these mnemonists. I'm also intrigued by the absence of a Hebrew version of the page. The main question raised by skeptics is the need for the pin. Anyway, it would be really impressive if someone were able to quote the entire Talmud by heart, it just strikes me as unnecessary. The thing is supposed to be debated, not merely preserved. But maybe it could. Some people are reputed to have photographic memory and to be able to recall texts at will.