Cooperation and the evolution of hunter-gatherer storytelling

Storytelling is a human universal. From gathering around the camp-fire telling tales of ancestors to watching the latest television box-set, humans are inveterate producers and consumers of stories. Despite its ubiquity, little attention has been given to understanding the function and evolution of storytelling. Here we explore the impact of storytelling on hunter-gatherer cooperative behaviour and the individual-level fitness benefits to being a skilled storyteller. Stories told by the Agta, a Filipino hunter-gatherer population, convey messages relevant to coordinating behaviour in a foraging ecology, such as cooperation, sex equality and egalitarianism. These themes are present in narratives from other foraging societies. We also show that the presence of good storytellers is associated with increased cooperation. In return, skilled storytellers are preferred social partners and have greater reproductive success, providing a pathway by which group-beneficial behaviours, such as storytelling, can evolve via individual-level selection. We conclude that one of the adaptive functions of storytelling among hunter gatherers may be to organise cooperation.Storytelling entails costs in terms of time and effort, yet it is a ubiquitous feature of human society. Here, Smith et al. show benefits of storytelling in Agta hunter-gatherer communities, as storytellers have higher reproductive success and storytelling is associated with higher cooperation in the group.

[1]  David G. Rand,et al.  Social heuristics shape intuitive cooperation , 2014, Nature Communications.

[2]  W. Hamilton.  The genetical evolution of social behaviour. I. , 1964, Journal of theoretical biology.

[3]  Lisa Zunshine,et al.  Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel , 2006 .

[4]  M. Gurven.  To give and to give not: The behavioral ecology of human food transfers , 2004, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

[5]  Gregory A. Bryant,et al.  Music and dance as a coalition signaling system , 2003, Human nature.

[6]  R. Mace,et al.  Saami reindeer herders cooperate with social group members and genetic kin , 2015 .

[7]  John J. Ross.  The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative , 2006 .

[8]  Keith Oatley,et al.  On Being Moved by Art: How Reading Fiction Transforms the Self , 2009 .

[9]  John Q. Patton.  Meat sharing for coalitional support , 2005 .

[10]  Michelle Scalise Sugiyama.  Food, foragers, and folklore: the role of narrative in human subsistence , 2001 .

[11]  L. Conradt,et al.  Consensus decision making in animals. , 2005, Trends in ecology & evolution.

[12]  P. Wiessner.  Embers of society: Firelight talk among the Ju/’hoansi Bushmen , 2014, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[13]  R. Mace,et al.  Networks of Food Sharing Reveal the Functional Significance of Multilevel Sociality in Two Hunter-Gatherer Groups , 2016, Current Biology.

[14]  R. Mace,et al.  High mobility explains demand sharing and enforced cooperation in egalitarian hunter-gatherers , 2014, Nature Communications.

[15]  M. Biesele,et al.  Women Like Meat: The Folklore and Foraging Ideology of the Kalahari Ju/'Hoan , 1993 .

[16]  L. Cormier.  The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers (review) , 2001 .

[17]  John Tooby,et al.  Does Beauty Build Adapted Minds? Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Aesthetics, Fiction, and the Arts , 2001 .

[18]  A. Heifetz.  Rational Ritual: Culture, Coordination, and Common Knowledge. , 2004 .

[19]  K Y Liang,et al.  Longitudinal data analysis for discrete and continuous outcomes. , 1986, Biometrics.

[20]  R. Mace,et al.  Sex equality can explain the unique social structure of hunter-gatherer bands , 2015, Science.

[21]  M. Gurven,et al.  The Social Strategy Game , 2010, Human nature.

[22]  Robin I. M. Dunbar,et al.  How conversations around campfires came to be , 2014, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[23]  Michelle Scalise Sugiyama,et al.  Social roles, prestige, and health risk , 2003, Human nature.

[24]  Colin Camerer.  Behavioral Game Theory: Experiments in Strategic Interaction , 2003 .

[25]  Ruth Mace,et al.  Camp stability predicts patterns of hunter–gatherer cooperation , 2016, Royal Society Open Science.

[26]  K. Endicott.  Batek Negrito Religion: The World-View and Rituals of a Hunting and Gathering People of Peninsular Malaysia , 1979, The Journal of Asian Studies.

[27]  K. Kramer,et al.  Cooperative breeding and its significance to the demographic success of humans. , 2010 .

[28]  A. Griffin,et al.  Social semantics : altruism , cooperation , mutualism , strong reciprocity and group selection , 2007 .

[29]  Michelle Scalise Sugiyama.  The Forager Oral Tradition and the Evolution of Prolonged Juvenility , 2011, Front. Psychology.

[30]  Cathryn Townsend.  Baka ritual flow diverted , 2015 .

[31]  Dirk Lindebaum.  Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind - A Review , 2015 .

[32]  J. Silk.  Social Components of Fitness in Primate Groups , 2007, Science.

[33]  M. Biesele.  How Hunter‐Gatherers' Stories “Make Sense”: Semantics and Adaptation , 1986 .

[34]  Jamshid J. Tehrani,et al.  Comparative phylogenetic analyses uncover the ancient roots of Indo-European folktales , 2016, Royal Society Open Science.

[35]  P. Richerson,et al.  The evolution of reciprocity in sizable groups. , 1988, Journal of theoretical biology.

[36]  Keith Oatley,et al.  The Function of Fiction is the Abstraction and Simulation of Social Experience , 2008, Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

[37]  Rob R. de Ruyter van Steveninck,et al.  The metabolic cost of neural information , 1998, Nature Neuroscience.

[38]  Max M. Krasnow,et al.  Evolution of direct reciprocity under uncertainty can explain human generosity in one-shot encounters , 2011, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[39]  R. Mace,et al.  Reproductive trade-offs in extant hunter-gatherers suggest adaptive mechanism for the Neolithic expansion , 2016, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[40]  K. Hawkes,et al.  Showing off, handicap signaling, and the evolution of men's work , 2002 .

[41]  M. Gurven,et al.  Resource Competition within Female Social Networks among Small-scale Forager-Horticulturalists , 2010 .

[42]  R. Trivers.  The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism , 1971, The Quarterly Review of Biology.

[43]  E. Fehr,et al.  The Coevolution of Cultural Groups and Ingroup Favoritism , 2008, Science.

[44]  R. Mace,et al.  Variation in Male Reproductive Longevity across Traditional Societies , 2014, PloS one.

[45]  R. Mcelreath,et al.  Shared Norms and the Evolution of Ethnic Markers , 2003, Current Anthropology.

[46]  Andrew G Thomas,et al.  Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science , 2018 .

[47]  C. Palmer,et al.  Once Upon a Time: Ancestors and the Evolutionary Significance of Stories , 2006 .

[48]  L. Putterman,et al.  Communication and punishment in voluntary contribution experiments , 2006 .

[49]  M. Nowak,et al.  Evolution of indirect reciprocity by image scoring , 1998, Nature.

[50]  M. Biesele.  Sapience and scarce resources: Communication systems of the !Kung and other foragers , 1978 .

[51]  Henry F. Lyle,et al.  Multiple reputation domains and cooperative behaviour in two Latin American communities , 2015, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

[52]  Michelle Scalise Sugiyama,et al.  “ Once the Child is Lost He Dies ”: Monster Stories vis-a-vis the Problem of Errant Children , 2011 .

[53]  N. Christakis,et al.  Social Networks and Cooperation in Hunter-Gatherers , 2011, Nature.

[54]  F. Marlowe,et al.  Hunter-Gatherers and the Origins of Religion , 2016, Human Nature.

[55]  Quentin D. Atkinson,et al.  Moralistic gods, supernatural punishment and the expansion of human sociality , 2016, Nature.

[56]  E. Smith.  Communication and collective action: language and the evolution of human cooperation , 2010 .

[57]  ปิยดา สมบัติวัฒนา.  Behavioral Game Theory: Experiments in Strategic Interaction , 2013 .

[58]  M. Nowak.  Five Rules for the Evolution of Cooperation , 2006, Science.

[59]  R. Baumeister,et al.  Self-control relies on glucose as a limited energy source: willpower is more than a metaphor. , 2007, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[60]  Michael Fisher,et al.  Hierarchy in the Forest , 1999 .

[61]  S. Hrdy.  Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding , 2009 .

[62]  R. Mace,et al.  Not leaving home: grandmothers and male dispersal in a duolocal human society , 2016, Behavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral Ecology.

[63]  R. Mace,et al.  Polygyny without wealth: popularity in gift games predicts polygyny in BaYaka Pygmies , 2015, Royal Society Open Science.

[64]  F. Marlowe.  Showoffs or Providers? The Parenting Effort of Hadza Men , 1999 .

[65]  Jordan B. Peterson,et al.  Bookworms versus nerds: Exposure to fiction versus non-fiction, divergent associations with social ability, and the simulation of fictional social worlds , 2006 .

[66]  P. Wiessner.  Norm enforcement among the Ju/’hoansi Bushmen , 2005, Human nature.

[67]  Brian Boyd,et al.  The evolution of stories: from mimesis to language, from fact to fiction , 2017, Wiley interdisciplinary reviews. Cognitive science.

[68]  Sandy Lovie.  How the mind works , 1980, Nature.

[69]  Michelle Scalise Sugiyama.  On the origins of narrative , 1996, Human nature.

[70]  Juliette Rouchier,et al.  Rational Ritual: Culture, Co-ordination and Common Knowledge by Michael Suk-Young Chwe , 2002, J. Artif. Soc. Soc. Simul..

[71]  Carol M. Lauer,et al.  Hierarchy in the forest: The evolution of egalitarian behavior , 2001 .

[72]  A. Griffin,et al.  Evolutionary Explanations for Cooperation , 2007, Current Biology.

[73]  Jerome Lewis,et al.  Forest hunter-gatherers and their world: a study of the Mbendjele Yaka pygmies of Congo-Brazzaville andtheir secular and religious activities and representations , 2002 .

[74]  Simon J. Greenhill,et al.  Broad supernatural punishment but not moralizing high gods precede the evolution of political complexity in Austronesia , 2015, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

[75]  Brian Boyd,et al.  On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction , 2009 .

[76]  Beth L. Leech,et al.  Meeting at Grand Central: Understanding the Social and Evolutionary Roots of Cooperation , 2012 .

[77]  Emanuele Castano,et al.  Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind , 2013, Science.

[78]  P. Kollock.  SOCIAL DILEMMAS: The Anatomy of Cooperation , 1998 .

[79]  Francesca Polletta,et al.  The Sociology of Storytelling , 2011 .