Historian Michael Button offers a fascinating meditation on the durability of story and the fragility of civilization. Drawing on geomythology, oral tradition research, and the “Silurian Hypothesis” proposed by Adam Frank and Gavin Schmidt, he argues that myths may sometimes function as resilient memory systems.

His central insight overturns one of modernity’s prejudices: the assumption that technologically sophisticated societies automatically preserve memory better than oral cultures do.

We moderns seem to believe that our vast cloud servers and digital archives guarantee permanence. Every day humanity produces incomprehensible quantities of data. Satellites map the globe. Servers hum in refrigerated fortresses. We imagine ourselves to be the most historically secure civilization that has ever existed.

But Button reminds us that silicon decays. Hard drives fail and formats become unreadable. Empires vanish and oceans rise. Plate tectonics slowly grind cities back into geology. Even an advanced industrial civilization might leave surprisingly little trace after enough millennia. That’s the thesis of the book “Silurian Hypothesis” by Adam Frank and Gavin Schmidt.

News Flash: The cloud is not even close to being immortal.

Meanwhile, cultures dismissed by modernity as “primitive” may have accomplished a vastly more durable storage system than we have. They encoded memory into story, ritual, song, and landscape.

This changes everything.

For centuries, many Western scholars assumed oral cultures couldn’t accurately preserve information for more than several hundred years. The assumption was rooted partly in arrogance and partly in projection. Because we ourselves have outsourced memory to devices, we imagine everyone else must have been similarly forgetful.

But oral cultures are entirely different cognitive ecologies.

When survival depends on remembering migration routes, water sources, coastlines, seasons, volcanic dangers, kinship obligations, and ceremonial knowledge, memory ceases to be optional ornamentation. It’s a sacred biological technology.



Button discusses the Klamath people’s account of the destruction of Mount Mazama, whose collapse formed Oregon’s Crater Lake 7,700 years ago. For generations, Westerners regarded the Klamath story as picturesque mythology.

Then geology discovered that the oral account aligns remarkably well with the actual sequence of volcanic events: fire from the sky, darkness from ash, the mountain collapsing into itself, the great cavity later filling with water.

Even more astonishing are the oral traditions of the Gunditjmara people in Australia, whose stories appear to preserve memories of volcanic activity dating back perhaps 37,000 years.

Thirty-seven thousand years ago, mammoths still walked the earth. The last Ice Age had not yet peaked. Yet human beings may have carried memory across more than a thousand generations through nothing more than disciplined storytelling embedded in ritual and community.

And this is where the modern dismissal of story begins to look naïve.

Certain contemporary spiritual philosophies tell us stories are prisons. Stories are ego. Stories are illusion. Stories are suffering-producing delusions from which awakened people should detach themselves.

But Indigenous traditions around the world often understand story very differently.

Story isn’t merely entertainment, self-narration, or psychological clutter.

Story is an infrastructure for reality. Story:

• preserves ecological intelligence
• transmits ethical memory
• binds generations together
• remembers what the ocean erased
• keeps the dead speaking to the living
• stores survival knowledge that may outlast libraries and servers

The Ojibway understanding of Adizokan, where story and spirit are intertwined, is less a poetic metaphor than profound epistemological insight. The human story-making impulse isn’t an accidental side effect of consciousness. It may be one of the primary ways consciousness protects continuity against time.

Michael Button suggests that oral storytelling systems function almost like distributed databases. The Songlines of Indigenous Australians anchor memory to landscape. Ritual retellings prevent informational drift. Multiple knowledge keepers cross-check accuracy. Narrative becomes a communal archive rather than private self-expression.

In other words: storytelling is one of humanity’s oldest knowledge technologies.

So the old Indigenous elders sitting around the fire no longer look less advanced than Silicon Valley engineers. In certain ways, they may have understood permanence more deeply than we do.

Our civilization knows how to accelerate information. Theirs knew how to incarnate it. We know how to produce data. They knew how to make memory survive.

This realization also changes how we think about myth.

Modernity often uses the word “myth” to mean “falsehood.” But many myths may be neither literal journalism nor fabricated fantasy. They may instead be compressed symbolic containers carrying durable truths across impossible spans of time. Myths are memory encrypted in imagination. So maybe imagination is one of truth’s oldest survival strategies.

Button ends with this observation: Perhaps the only thing capable of crossing the hundred-thousand-year threshold isn’t stone, steel, or silicon, but story. Long after the skyscrapers collapse and the servers fall silent, a song will remain. A grandmother’s voice around a fire will outlive the cloud.

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Watch Michael Button's video presentation here