Consider the many cultures that Europeans discovered in the Americas. Of them, only one had a real writing system (the Maya). The Aztecs wrote down history in a sort of comic book form, and the Inca did accounting with qhipu, but only the Maya had a conventional system of written forms that correspond systematically with verbal language.
You can communicate and remember a lot orally. The Polynesian navigators encoded information about how to navigate from island to island in oral poems passed down generation to generation. A lot of these traditions seem to vanish once a culture gets writing, leaving it unclear how they used to pass on so much information before.
You can communicate and remember a lot orally. The Polynesian navigators encoded information about how to navigate from island to island in oral poems passed down generation to generation. A lot of these traditions seem to vanish once a culture gets writing, leaving it unclear how they used to pass on so much information before.