Puzzle of oral tradition in ancient India

Ever wondered why the oldest civilization on earth that gave the world the concept of zero, defined time in terms of billions of years, showed the world the window to astronomy and medicine (ayurveda) practiced the oral way of tranmitting knowledge from one generation to another.

When the knowledge to document on leaves, brass metal sheets and stones were known, why would someone look to memorizing huge texts. In fact we observe that great care and discipline was followed between the guru and the students in passing information this way in a systematic manner.

So what am I trying to point to ?

Hmmm...currently we are storing everything in paper or digital format.
Imagine a global catastrophe or a nuclear war that destroys every form of stored information.
Where will we be - Stone age ?
Whom can we look upto ?
Thats when the power of human memory comes to our rescue.

There is ample evidence to suggest that some great act of nature such as floods or meteroite hit happened or even worse a nuclear holocaust happened millions of years ago. It wiped out civilizations and only a few managed to escape and survive.

It seems like the ancient Hindu cvilization could predict such a catastrophe and encouraged the oral tradtion before the human race could go down.

Is it time for us to take a relook to the oral tradtion ?

Will it be possible for us to convert the huge amount of knowledge that into we have into oral form.
We need to look into our ancient past to find answers to these before its too late.