Abstract:

Storytelling, whether around a campfire, in a café or a sold out theater, is ubiquitous in human culture.  Globally, storytelling through film, television, books, videogames and other media represents a $300 billion industry.  The universality of storytelling suggests that this behavior has deep roots.  It also begs the questions of why we as humans find stories so compelling and what the evolutionary context for this behavior might be.  The ways in which  children learn in foraging societies differ from the classroom-based style of learning and teaching typical of industrialized societies in the West.  This difference, however, has often been mischaracterized by anthropologists as an absence or rarity of direct teaching in foraging societies. In this talk, following the work of Scalise Sugiyama, I argue that oral storytelling is a form of pedagogy in foraging societies that shares  many of the features of direct teaching. Building on ethnographic data,   I explore the evolutionary context,  adaptive features  and cognitive underpinnings of storytelling.   I then present archaeological evidence for storytelling and narrative in the Upper Paleolithic. Finally, arguing that storytelling is a vehicle for cumulative culture, I consider the implications of this form of teaching for  skill acquisition and knowledge transmission among Upper Paleolithic  children and  adolescents and for their role as drivers of human cultural evolution.

Prof. April Nowell--Short Bio 

Prof. April Nowell is a Paleolithic archaeologist and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Victoria, Canada. She received her BA from McGill University (Montreal) and her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia).  She directs an international team of researchers in the excavation of Lower and Middle Paleolithic sites in Jordan and collaborates with colleagues on the study of cave art in Australia.  She and her colleagues working in Jordan published the world’s oldest identifiable blood on stone tools, demonstrating that 300,000 years ago early humans ate a range of animals from duck to rhinoceros. She is known for her publications on Paleolithic art, cognitive archaeology, the evolutionary basis for storytelling, Neanderthals, the archaeology of children and the relationship between science, pop culture, and the media. Her work has been covered by more than 100 outlets including Nature Briefings, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Economist, and National Public Radio, and her team’s blood residue work was named one of Time Magazine’s top 100 discoveries. She often serves as a Smithsonian Journey’s expert on their trips to visit the prehistoric painted caves of France and Spain.  She is the co-editor of multiple volumes including Archaeology of Night: Life After Dark in the Ancient World and author of the book Growing Up in the Ice Age, winner of the 2023 European Association of Archaeologists Book Prize.  Watch her in episode 5 of the NOVA series Ancient Earth (2023) and in the  CBC documentary Little Sapiens (2024) (soon to be distributed internationally).

Prof. Nowell is a short-term visiting scholar on behalf of the Halbert Center for Canadian.