The Role of Myth in Anthropogeny

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Summary:
The human penchant for storytelling is universal, early-developing, and profoundly culture-shaping. Stories (folk tales, narratives and myths) influence the costs of social transactions and organize societies at every scale of human interaction. Story as a mode of communication is also unprecedented in the animal kingdom: although we are compelled to tell stories about other animals, they are not likewise compelled to tell stories about us (or anything else, for that matter). Even scientists who attempt to objectively understand human origins are destined to craft those explanations as stories, often with narrative and/or mythic overtones. From the domestication of fire to the emergence of cooperative hunting to the evolutionary origins of human cognition, our understanding of the human journey is deeply influenced by stories embedded in our cultural histories. Even our ability to manage urgent human problems such as global health and climate change are affected by the stories and myths humans choose to tell. This symposium explores several stories about how the evolution of storytelling shaped, and continues to shape, the human epoch.

Event Sessions:

Speakers	Session
Daniel Povinelli	Opening Remarks
Brian Boyd	Why Do Humans Tell Stories?
Susan Engel	How Children Become Storytellers In this talk I will describe how and when children begin to tell stories (of all kinds) and why some children tell many stories and others do not. I will outline the psychological uses of storytelling during childhood. I will end by considering the role storytelling plays in children's intellectual development, and implications of that for what happens in schools.
Brandon Barker	Cultural Universals? Folktales, Animals, and the Human Search for Origins
Pauline Wiessner	The Role of Stories in Creating Imaginary Communities
Mathias Guenther	The Salience of Animals and the Trickster in San and Hunter-gatherer Mythology
Daniel Povinelli	All the Stories Animals Don’t Tell
Michael Chazan	Stories of Fire: Origins, Interactions, and Futures
Karen Kramer	Hunting Hypothesis and Male Myths in Anthropogeny
Mark Honigsbaum	Writing Plague: Myth, Morality, and Modernity In the foundational texts of Western civilisation (the Bible, Iliad), plagues are symbols of divine retribution, signifying Godly displeasure with human misdeeds. But in Thucydides’ classic account of the mysterious plague that swept Athens in 430 BC, Camus’s La Peste, and Elizabeth St John Mandel’s Station Eleven, literary accounts of plagues and pandemics are also morality tales and metaphors for the dissolution of the social bonds necessary for the functioning of modern societies. In this... read more