The evolution of stories: from mimesis to language, from fact to fiction

Abstract

Why a species as successful as Homo sapiens should spend so much time in fiction, in telling one another stories that neither side believes, at first seems an evolutionary riddle. Because of the advantages of tracking and recombining true information, capacities for event comprehension, memory, imagination, and communication evolved in a range of animal species—yet even chimpanzees cannot communicate beyond the here and now. By Homo erectus, our forebears had reached an increasing dependence on one another, not least in sharing information in mimetic, prelinguistic ways. As Daniel Dor shows, the pressure to pool ever more information, even beyond currently shared experience, led to the invention of language. Language in turn swiftly unlocked efficient forms of narrative, allowing early humans to learn much more about their kind than they could experience at first hand, so that they could cooperate and compete better through understanding one another more fully. This changed the payoff of sociality for individuals and groups. But true narrative was still limited to what had already happened. Once the strong existing predisposition to play combined with existing capacities for event comprehension, memory, imagination, language, and narrative, we could begin to invent fiction, and to explore the full range of human possibilities in concentrated, engaging, memorable forms. First language, then narrative, then fiction, created niches that altered selection pressures, and made us ever more deeply dependent on knowing more about our kind and our risks and opportunities than we could discover through direct experience. WIREs Cogn Sci 2018, 9:e1444. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1444This article is categorized under: Cognitive Biology > Evolutionary Roots of CognitionLinguistics > Evolution of LanguageNeuroscience > Cognition

Storytelling as Adaptive Collective Sensemaking

“…In forager societies, storytelling may have constituted an effective practice for the transmission of survival‐relevant information, allowing group members to avoid physical, social, and health risks and increase their fitness (Boyd, ; Scalise Sugiyama, , ). Stories about survival‐relevant information reduce the complexity of the natural and social world (e.g., by compressing time relative to the actual experience being transmitted) and reduce the risk involved in acquiring such information.…”

“…The universality of storytelling (Brown, ) suggests it may have an adaptive function; that is, it may have evolved because it confers some kind of fitness benefit to individuals or groups in the ancestral environments where it emerged. Various contenders for this function have been suggested, including (a) manipulating the beliefs of the audience to enhance the fitness of the narrator (Scalise Sugiyama, ), (b) transmitting survival‐relevant information while avoiding the costs involved in the first‐hand acquisition of that information (Boyd, ; Scalise Sugiyama, ), or (c) maintaining social bonds or group‐level cooperation (Dunbar, ; Smith et al., ).…”

Storytelling as adaptive collective sensemaking

“…In forager societies, storytelling may have constituted an effective practice for the transmission of survival-relevant information, allowing group members to avoid physical, social, and health risks and increase their fitness (Boyd, 2017;Scalise Sugiyama, 2001. Stories about survival-relevant information reduce the complexity of the natural and social world (e.g., by compressing time relative to the actual experience being transmitted) and reduce the risk involved in acquiring such information.…”

“…The universality of storytelling suggests it may have an adaptive function; that is, it may have evolved because it confers some kind of fitness benefit to individuals or groups in the ancestral environments where it emerged. Various contenders for this function have been suggested, including (a) manipulating the beliefs of the audience to enhance the fitness of the narrator (Scalise Sugiyama, 1996), (b) transmitting survivalrelevant information while avoiding the costs involved in the first-hand acquisition of that information (Boyd, 2017;Scalise Sugiyama, 2001), or (c) maintaining social bonds or group-level cooperation (Dunbar, 1996;Smith et al, 2017).…”

Deliberate storytelling in big data analytics adoption

“…Storytelling is a powerful narrative technique with a deep evolutionary history in Homo sapiens (Boyd, ). Building on the storytelling research summarized above, this study introduces the concept of “deliberate storytelling.” Deliberate storytelling refers to the planned and intentional use of stories (created by an organization for employees) for the purpose of achieving a particular goal.…”