Were kids who listened to their bedtime stories better at being adults? According to a paper by Michelle Scalise Sugiyama, storytelling may have developed as another aspect of parental care and the preparation of offspring for the challenges of a forager. Language conferred evolutionary advantages to our foraging ancestors, as more information could be shared that was dangerous to find out first-hand. In addition to helping out kin, sharing information with those who could reciprocate in the future helped minimize risks associated with finding resources, etc. These are all benefits of sharing among active adults who were involved in foraging. However, there is also a strong old to young oral tradition, whether by children overhearing stories of the hunt or direct storytelling, that could have conferred additional advantages. In addition to resources, an important part of parental care was the passing down of knowledge. Warnings and advice would have been one aspect. The narrative would have been another important way of transmitting knowledge and increasing offspring survival. Specifically, the main hypothesis explored was that the vicarious experience of stories prepared offspring to plan, a cognitive process important to foraging lifestyles, through increasing episodic memory. The paper combines anthropology, cognitive studies in development, and evolution for evidence.
http://www.frontiersin.org/Evolutionary_Psychology/10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00133/abstract
-Nicole Scott
What about the stories that don't pass on details of how to hunt. I guess I'm thinking of fairy tales, or are the emergence of those indicative of the evolution of our moral evolution, since many tales have a "moral of the story"?
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