In philosophy class, I recently heard about how anthropologists have begun looking to indigenous societies' oral histories/tales as a form of historical evidence. Our lecturer told us that this approach, traditionally overlooked by (Western) historians, has proven to be very accurate.
However, no specific examples were shared, and all I could find online was this Reddit comment about how Indonesian spoken genealogies were found to exactly match colonial Dutch records. Are there any further concrete examples of how the results of oral tradition has matched up with other historical methods? I intend to discuss the topic in an upcoming essay, but am having trouble finding a detailed instance of this happening (though I'm sure this is frequent).
This 2015 Kathryn Schulz New Yorker article on the Cascadia subduction zone, a huge tectonic fault line in the Pacific Northwest, features a phenomenal account of the fault line's discovery and the pinpointing of the date and time of its most recent earthquake (evening of January 26, 1700). The discovery was made through a combination and cross-referencing of seismology, dendrochronology, Japanese record-keeping of tsunamis, and Huu-ay-aht First Nation and Makah Tribe oral history.
One still-controversial example is that the Lemba people of southern Africa frequently cited their oral traditions to argue they were of Jewish descent. For quite a while, historians assumed this was something more like the Black Hebrew Israelites in the US (who have recently gotten new attention)--a modern ideological-religious invention designed to lay claim to a history that the people involved saw as conferring prestige or meaning on their communities. (Much as some independent religious communities in southern Africa have been led by prophetic figures who claim relationships to Jesus or even to be the Second Coming of Jesus.) Or that the Lemba were just reproducing some of the racial ideology commonly associated with the "Hamitic myth" among the British and white South Africans. (The same sort of thing that led to the common colonial-era falsehood that Great Zimbabwe was built by Solomon or some other group of racial outsiders.)
Then in the late 1990s newly evaluated genetic evidence suggested that the Lemba absolutely were related to Jewish populations elsewhere, and that many Lemba men had the Cohen modal haplotype associated with the Kohanim (hereditary religious authorities). There have been continuing debates ever since about the genetic evidence, and the strength of the earliest findings have been modified somewhat, but there is still strong evidence that some contemporary Lemba men have strong and quite old genetic links to distinctively Middle Eastern populations, unlike their neighbors. So something about their oral traditions seems to be true in that respect.
Not my field, but I remember a lecturer coming to class one day who talked about the intersection between local mythology and actual historical events from a geology perspective as we were STEM students. His example was of a group of people who had a story about a land/mud monster that attacked the village and later on researchers found out that there had been a landslide at that village that had occurred around when the story originated.
I wish I could remember more, but that may work as a starting point.