How conversations around campfires came to be

Abstract

Fire and conversation are two things that have been of crucial importance for our evolutionary story, yet they have received only rather casual attention. Yes, we know that fire was used for cooking (probably casually at first, but later as a matter of regularity), and, yes, we know that language evolved at some point and has been important for human culture. However, there has been a longstanding tendency to take these two phenomena for granted as something self-evidently useful and hence presumably of ancient origin. In PNAS, Wiessner (1) brings these two phenomena together in a way that has significant implications for our understanding of both why they evolved and when they did so. In the first such study of its kind, she recorded the topics of conversation during the day and around the campfire at night among a group of Ju’/hoansi (or !Kung) Bushman in Botswana, a people whose living hunter-gatherer ecology is similar to that which characterized most of our evolutionary history. In this sample, most daytime conversations were functional (discussions of land rights, economic matters, norm regulation), but most evening conversations were social (more than 80% were stories). Stories are important in all societies because they provide the framework that holds the community together: we share this a set of cultural knowledge because we are who we are, and that is why we are different from the folks that live over the hill.

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