Among the Agta, a forager people of the northern Philippines, researchers asked a simple question: who in your camp tells the best stories? Hundreds of people gave names. Then the researchers compared those names with who people said they wanted as neighbors, how generous people were in a sharing game, and how many children they had. The pattern that emerged is one of the more striking recent attempts to ask what storytelling does for a community.
It is not the only way to ask the question, and it does not settle it. But it is a good place to begin, because it treats storytelling as something people do together, with consequences, rather than as decoration on top of real life.
What the Agta study measured
The 2017 study by Daniel Smith and colleagues in Nature Communications worked with Agta camps in two municipalities of the Philippines. Nearly 300 people nominated the best storytellers in their own camp, and the authors scored storytelling skill relative to each camp. A few hundred adults also played a game in which they could keep or give away rice tokens to named camp-mates.
- Ask who tells the best stories. Camp members nominated skilled storytellers; skill was judged relative to others in the same camp.
- Play a sharing game. Adults chose how many rice tokens to give to specific camp-mates.
- Ask who people want to live with. Each person named camp-mates they would most like as neighbors.
- Compare. Camps with more skilled storytellers gave more in the game, and skilled storytellers were nearly twice as likely to be chosen as future neighbors.
The authors also coded the content of 89 stories from seven foraging societies. About 70 percent were mainly about social behavior, such as how to treat others, rather than about, say, hunting techniques. One Agta story about the sun and the moon sharing the sky was read by the authors as promoting sharing and equality between the sexes.
A separate result drew headlines: skilled storytellers had, on average, about half a child more than others (0.53 more living offspring). The authors suggested this might reflect the social support that popular people receive, but that is an interpretation, not something the study demonstrated.
Why this is only a starting point
The authors themselves describe their results as largely correlational. A camp that already cooperates well might simply have more occasion to tell stories, or good storytellers might also be charming in ways the study did not measure. Only 18 camps entered the cooperation analysis, the nominations were peer opinions, and “storytelling” was defined broadly, including everyday anecdotes. Detailed story recordings came from just three elders. And the Agta are one society; they cannot stand in for “hunter-gatherers” as a whole, let alone for all of humanity.
Stories as shared memory
Stories also carry information across generations. Before writing, and alongside it ever since, spoken narrative has been a way to hold a community’s knowledge, humor, and rules together (for the longer story of what writing changed, see how writing transformed human memory).
Two examples from different regions show how varied these traditions are. In Mauritania, the T’heydinn is an epic of dozens of poems praising the feats of Moorish emirs and sultans, performed by griots with lutes, harps, and a kettledrum. UNESCO’s 2011 listing notes it is performed at weddings and reconciliation ceremonies and helps bind tribal and family groups, while also warning that few griots now know the whole epic. In China, the Hezhen people’s Yimakan tradition alternates singing and speaking, with different melodies marking characters and turns of plot, and no instruments. When it was listed as in need of urgent safeguarding, a United Nations report said only five masters could still perform some of its cantos.
These traditions are not “earlier versions” of anything. They are living art forms with their own skills, audiences, and stakes, and in both cases the concern is that younger people have fewer occasions to hear them.
How far back can a story travel?
A much-debated 2015 paper by Patrick Nunn and Nicholas Reid in Australian Geographer examined 21 Aboriginal Australian coastal stories and argued that some preserve memories of rising seas more than 7,000 years ago. Science News reported that some scholars find this persuasive, noting other oral traditions that appear to preserve verified events from thousands of years back, while others doubt that oral accounts can stay stable for so long, or argue the claim can be neither verified nor falsified.
A modest conclusion
Stories do many jobs at once: they entertain, teach, soothe, argue, and remember. The best-supported thing we can say from the research above is narrow but interesting: in at least one forager society, being good at telling stories went along with being valued and with living among more generous neighbors. Whether that holds elsewhere, and in which direction the arrows point, is still open. If you are curious how the urge to make things connects across media, see the human urge to create, and for why a told story is never a perfect recording, why your memory is a reconstruction.
