Abstract This paper examines how multiple ancient cultures independently developed systematic frameworks for understanding that cosmic and social order is neither given nor permanent, but requires continuous active maintenance. Drawing on Aboriginal Australian Songlines as an anchor case, and examining Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Greek, Vedic, and Chinese cosmological traditions alongside early archaeological evidence from Göbekli Tepe, the analysis identifies a recurring structural pattern: the recognition that coherence—understood as stable, meaningful, relational order—naturally tends toward dissolution, and that human cognitive and ritual action plays a constitutive role in its renewal. The paper treats these ancient knowledge systems on their own epistemological terms, avoiding both the reduction of cosmology to "myth" and the retrospective projection of modern scientific concepts onto pre-scientific thought. A methodological framework distinguishing coherence, de-coherence, and re-coherence as analytic categories enables structural comparison across traditions without claiming cultural equivalence or universal meaning. Only after establishing the ancient epistemic landscape does the analysis engage modern physics—specifically thermodynamic entropy and quantum decoherence—not to validate ancient knowledge by modern standards, but to observe that contemporary science has, through entirely different methods, arrived at structurally similar recognitions: that order is improbable, fragile, and non-self-sustaining. The convergence is treated as evidence that these traditions were tracking genuine features of reality through the cognitive and observational tools available to them. The paper concludes that the longevity of certain knowledge systems—particularly the Aboriginal Australian tradition spanning at least 65,000 years—constitutes an empirical signal worthy of serious attention, and that the concept of re-coherence as active world-maintenance offers a unifying frame for understanding human responses to entropy, uncertainty, and the fragility of meaning. Keywords: cosmology, coherence, entropy, Aboriginal Songlines, ancient knowledge systems, world-maintenance, epistemology, comparative cosmology
Smith et al. (Sat,) studied this question.