The oldest oral story. Australian Aboriginal groups preserved oral stories describing land that existed where the ocean is today. People walked and hunted there. Then they talk of a time when the sea came in and swallowed it. Researchers compared stories from 21 locations around Australia with actual sea level data and underwater geography. Some of those stories appear to describe coastlines that disappeared between roughly 7,000 and 13,000 years ago. It was the end of the last Ice Age. Melting ice sheets raised global sea levels and flooded huge areas of coastal land. The great flood. Around Port Phillip Bay, Aboriginal tradition says the bay was once dry land where people hunted kangaroos and emus. The water broke through and flooded the country. Geological evidence shows Port Phillip really was dry during the late Ice Age before rising seas filled it. Someone actually watched that happen. They told their children and then those children told theirs. The story may have survived for hundreds of generations, all the way back to around 11,000 BCE. Hmmm. What does that clue tell us?