Before we could write stuff down, it was especially important to have someone in the group who could remember earlier crises. It’s usually not hard to find someone who can remember a difficult thing that happened ten years ago. It’s much harder to find someone who remembers a difficult thing that happened forty years ago, or how, precisely, the community managed to find a work-around. Oral history provides only so much after the storyteller dies. Living long enough to see a rare crisis happen again is the most reliable way to know whether a piece of knowledge is something the entire group
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