I’ll be traveling to Australia this August for Outlast research, and along the way I discovered something astonishing: songlines.
For tens of thousands of years, Aboriginal Australians have navigated the land by singing it. These oral maps — songs linking waterholes, campsites, and sacred sites — encode geography into melody.
Passed down through generations, they guide people across vast terrain without a single written word. The counterintuitive insight? In one of the world’s oldest surviving cultures, knowledge lasts not because it’s written down, but because it’s performed. Longevity, it turns out, can be sung.
