For a writer, it’s heartening to learn that the first invention to set the human race on its triumphal march towards global ecocide – fire – is intimately linked to the development of storytelling. According to a study just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), and widely reported in Science Magazine and elsewhere, “comparison of 174 day and nighttime conversations among the Ju/’hoan (!Kung) Bushmen of southern Africa, supplemented by 68 translated texts,” suggests a major dichotomy between daytime talk and nighttime banter around the campfire, with the latter given over, as well as to “singing, dancing, religious ceremonies,” to “enthralling stories, often about known people.”

According to the abstract of the paper, written by  Polly W. Wiessner, Professor in the Anthropology Department of the University of Utah, “such stories describe the workings of entire institutions in a small-scale society with little formal teaching.” So interestingly, among the !Kung people at least, instead of the myths and folklore that Westerners might expect, we seem to be dealing with something like the hunter-gatherer equivalent of Jane Austen narratives as the basic stuff of fireside talk.

Wiessner also implies that storytelling might have been almost as pivotal in the development of civilization as fire itself. “Night talk plays an important role in evoking higher orders of theory of mind via the imagination, conveying attributes of people in broad networks (virtual communities), and transmitting the ‘big picture’ of cultural institutions that generate regularity of behavior, cooperation, and trust at the regional level.” And bear in mind, for those who look backwards out of a modern technological mindset that sees cultural advancement in the form of inventions, that the human race and civilization could never have progressed to the level where a science of any kind would have been possible without those cultural institutions to enable the development of agriculture, writing, learning, and so on. Humankind is one big story that we have been making up as we go along, and storytelling was fundamental in creating it.

It’s interesting to compare this to the theory elaborated by primatologist Richard Wrangham in his book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, that “learning to cook food was the hinge on which human evolution turned,” and “eating cooked food … enabled us to evolve our large brains.” Fire, cooking, and storytelling could have formed a virtuous spiral that propelled mankind upwards towards civilization. As to the thesis coyly hinted by French thinker Gaston Bachelard in his book The Psychoanalysis of Fire, though, that early firemaking techniques owed much to masturbation, well, that’s another … ahem … story.

1 COMMENT

  1. Quote: ” instead of the myths and folklore that Westerners might expect, we seem to be dealing with something like the hunter-gatherer equivalent of Jane Austen narratives as the basic stuff of fireside talk.”

    Yes, but what is the hunter-gather equivalent of the opening to Jane Austin’s Pride and Prejudice:

    “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”

    Darcey owned a huge estate. Hunter-gathers don’t own land. Perhaps is was something like:

    “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of good hunting skills must be in want of a wife.”

    That said, I wouldn’t any stock in evolutionary theories about fire, cooking, stories or the rest. You can prove anything or its opposite with Darwinian handwaving. Survival of the fittest is meaningless when fittest is defined by surviving. It is a tautology.

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