@tinydoctor @band
I'm not sure about that. Esp. in societies without literacy, oral memory can strech thousands of years (channeling Ong). Australian natives are said to have had a collective memory of 40,000 years. Not sure about that but the possibility seems real enough.

Perhaps coming into play is the shortterm-ness of memories in those societies and civilisations that outsource memory and recollection to material carriers, i.e., the Western sphere with about (give or take) 4,000 years of "understanding", i.e., feeling akin and belonging to.

When, in fact, you start with writing and come to put down sentences, then, accordingly, to come up with an understanding of knowledge that is sentences-long and, via writing, exchangable to and fro, thus dissolving the relation between knower and known, and creating what now looks like "known subject" external to the knower, then in recollection you no longer invest in memorizing for yourself. Capitalism started far earlier than people usually think: It started with the externalisation and the outsoucing of rembrance. Outsourcing, that is, as something onto which could be put a price tag on.