Recently, I watched this video, which claimed that a large and sudden flood filled the Black Sea to its current level, and may have inspired the Noah's Ark flood story (and presumably other flood myths). If this were to be true, it would be thousands of years between the flood itself and when the Noah's Ark story was written down.
Although I'm doubtful that a Black Sea deluge was responsible for the world's flood myths, it got me thinking. If a major event took place before the advent of writing, how long could word of it be passed down? I assume that there'd be a point that a story is either lost or distorted to the point that it seems unrelated to the original event, but I don't know how long that would take. Are there any examples of prehistoric events being passed down in the form of stories and myths over a long period of time?
TL;DR- There are indeed examples of oral traditions accurately recording events that took place hundreds, even a thousand years ago. ask/anthropology might be another place to check with.
I responded to a similar question last week [here] (http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2p0vtu/how_accurate_is_oral_history/cmsbmvy); but basically oral histories can remain extremely accurate for hundreds and hundreds of years. The example I gave in that thread was from an anthropologist James Fox who while in Indonesia recorded a number of oral histories and genealogies because that's what people expect anthropologists to do (he was actually working on something else entirely, but recorded them nonetheless). He though; great these people have given me unreliable, malleable, histories that likely represent mere justifications for the power or land structures of the present than an actual past. Years later, while researching in the Dutch East India Company archives he started coming across familiar names and events, only to realize that the written archive of the company corroborate the oral archive as far back as 1662. This finding lead Fox to believe that the oral archive must be accurate going much further back.
Historian David Hanlon had a similar experience on the Micronesian island of Pohnpei; hearing oral histories, recording them and then corroborating those stories through other means. Hanlon is a bit different in that he expected the oral histories to be accurate in that they represented a form of the past; but their description of the island's invasion and disruption by the foreign Saudeleur dynasty and the construction and expansion of the artificial islands at Nan Madol are backed up by the physical evidence found on the island and the oral traditions of nearby islands. In this case the oral histories can take us back till around the 12th/c when the initial invasion seems to have taken place- though it is hard to say with absolute certainty as oral traditions (and even written records) rarely mark time in the same way as we do now, or privilege the marking of time as an important part in understanding the past.
Hanlon also relates another amusing story about oral histories on the island. At one point a European beachcomber; that is someone who stuck around on the islands and lived there during the early days of contact between islanders and Europeans, for some reason had a book with him. He used the book to show the islanders how superior his form of recording and remembering the past was. He could merely read the pages and tell the stories contained in the book even if he didn't already know them. This greatly impressed the islanders who could see the obvious utility in such technology... but then it rained. It rained and the poor book got water logged which left its words unreadable, its knowledge lost, and left the Pohnpeians feeling pretty good about their own oral histories as a means for knowledge transmission rather than a book which can be destroyed.
David Hanlon, Upon a Stone Altar: A History of the Island of Pohnpei to 1890. 1988. University of Hawaiʻi Press, Honolulu, Hawaii.
Hanlon, David. “Beyond the ‘English Method of Tattooing:’ Decentering the Practice of History in Oceania.” The Contemporary Pacific 15:1 (Spring 2003): 19-40.
James J. Fox, Harvest of the Palm: Ecological Change in Eastern Indonesia. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977.