'Isabel’s mother, Mrs Hansen, told stories from the traditional knowledge of her tribe, the Wangkamadla people, that Isabel passed on to her daughter Avelina.
We have combined these with the archaeological work of Iain in different parts of Australia, to extend the connectivity of those songs and tracks from one region to another.
Rock art images in one region show Songlines reached from Murujuga beside the Indian Ocean to the eastern Simpson Desert 2,300 kilometers away.'
Chapter here in Iain's recent book, ask him to send it to you!
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-90458-5_9
In this chapter I seek to apply to the art of Sahul the principles I outlined for art in the previous chapter, beginning with some essential features of the continent of Sahul. I then look at the conditions applicable to the principles of art that I explored for the...
@RadicalAnthro @ArchaeoIain Fascinating stuff, thanks for sharing!
Really interested in the types of meaning encoded in these art & stories. Is it practical, eg where pituri can be found? Social, eg how members of the tribe should interact? Personal? Mythological? Other?
@RadicalAnthro @ArchaeoIain Also interesting parallels to collective ecology, the study of how individuals of a species share information to improve their understanding of the world around them.
For instance, @ngaylinn just introduced me to this paper out of the Oestreich lab at MBARI which suggests that whale song is a critical communication mechanism to share information about the ocean environment, so the whales can time their migrations and better locate feeding grounds.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-65827-2
The human and whale experiences seem similar here. Both are long and difficult migrations through "empty" spaces that are mediated by songs that are deeply tied to the geography within they travel.
I wonder if the whales experience their songs as story? And conversely, I wonder if the humans' stories help them understand and survive in a difficult landscape?
Social information is predicted to enhance the quality of animals’ migratory decisions in dynamic ecosystems, but the relative benefits of social information in the long-range movements of marine megafauna are unknown. In particular, whether and how migrants use nonlocal information gained through social communication at the large spatial scale of oceanic ecosystems remains unclear. Here we test hypotheses about the cues underlying timing of blue whales’ breeding migration in the Northeast Pacific via individual-based models parameterized by empirical behavioral data. Comparing emergent patterns from individual-based models to individual and population-level empirical metrics of migration timing, we find that individual whales likely rely on both personal and social sources of information about forage availability in deciding when to depart from their vast and dynamic foraging habitat and initiate breeding migration. Empirical patterns of migratory phenology can only be reproduced by models in which individuals use long-distance social information about conspecifics’ behavioral state, which is known to be encoded in the patterning of their widely propagating songs. Further, social communication improves pre-migration seasonal foraging performance by over 60% relative to asocial movement mechanisms. Our results suggest that long-range communication enhances the perceptual ranges of migrating whales beyond that of any individual, resulting in increased foraging performance and more collective migration timing. These findings indicate the value of nonlocal social information in an oceanic migrant and suggest the importance of long-distance acoustic communication in the collective migration of wide-ranging marine megafauna.
Radical Anthropology
Talisyn Tailfeather