We’ve all played it at some point. I whisper a complex message to you, you pass it on as best as you can. It goes through a group of people and the end result is nothing like the original message.

I have a recipe for Spanish Rice given to me by my mom over the phone. It’s a list of ingredients to put in a frying pan, with almost no measurements. “A big squeeze” of a bottle, “just a little bit” of another item. The only definitive instructions are to bake in a dish at 350° for about 30 minutes, with the water ‘just above the rice’.

I just made it for the first time this year and didn’t put enough water. I salvaged it by adding water in a much bigger dish, but it’s definitely not the best version I’ve made. I’ll make it better next time, because I’ll remember this experience. But both my daughters love this recipe and I’ll need to do a better job of sharing it with them rather than this vague set of instructions that I’ve used for over two decades now.

This makes me marvel at the way knowledge was shared through oral traditions, for thousands of years before written history. It makes sense that stories and metaphors were used to help make the information easier to transfer.

A great example is the three sisters:

“The Three Sisters are the three main agricultural crops of various indigenous people of Central and North America: squash, maize (“corn”), and climbing beans (typically tepary beans or common beans). In a technique known as companion planting, the maize and beans are often planted together in mounds formed by hilling soil around the base of the plants each year; squash is typically planted between the mounds. The cornstalk serves as a trellis for climbing beans, the beans fix nitrogen in their root nodules and stabilize the maize in high winds, and the wide leaves of the squash plant shade the ground, keeping the soil moist and helping prevent the establishment of weeds.” ~ Wikipedia

How many generations did it take to learn of this symbiotic relationship between the 3 plants? And then, how clever to call them ‘sisters’ to help solidify their relationship and easily pass on the information to the next generation.

But I also wonder what knowledge was lost, or passed on inaccurately? What stories live on, like those of a great flood shared by cultures and peoples all over the world; yet have been given different meanings and interpretations that are based on the metaphors and stories of them being transferred poorly, like the telephone game, over centuries and centuries, over an unknown number of generations. For most of human history the telephone game was the main way to transfer knowledge. What was lost along the way?