“The locals actually have stories of these little people who couldn’t really use language, but if you said something to them, they would repeat it. Indigenous people on the isle of Flores in Indonesia, meanwhile, have long had myths of the Ebu Gogo – short, hobbit-like creatures without language, which appear to relate to archaeological remains of a human sub-species that overlapped with the Homo sapiens population before going extinct more than 10,000 years ago. Daniel Kruger points out that tales such as the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the Book of Genesis in the Old Testament, contain details of a mythical flood that may tap into lingering cultural memories of real, geological events in the Middle East from the end of the last Ice Age. The Epic of Gilgamesh provides one example from ancient literature.Īlthough we have no firm evidence, it’s possible that some tales we still read today may have their origins in deep prehistory. Crucially, this then appeared to translate to their real-life behaviour the groups that appeared to invest the most in storytelling also proved to be the most cooperative during various experimental tasks – exactly as the evolutionary theory would suggest. He found nearly 80% of their tales concerned moral decision making and social dilemmas (as opposed to stories about, say, nature). The anthropologist Daniel Smith of University College London recently visited 18 groups of hunter-gatherers of the Philippines. “The lesson is to resist tyranny and don’t become a tyrant yourself,” Kruger said.Īlong these lines, various studies have identified cooperation as a core theme in popular narratives across the world. Our capacity for storytelling – and the tales we tell – may have therefore also evolved as a way of communicating the right social norms. As humans evolved to live in bigger societies, for instance, we needed to learn how to cooperate, without being a ‘free rider’ who takes too much and gives nothing, or overbearing individuals abusing their dominance to the detriment of the group’s welfare. Providing some evidence for this theory, brain scans have shown that reading or hearing stories activates various areas of the cortex that are known to be involved in social and emotional processing, and the more people read fiction, the easier they find it to empathise with other people.Ĭrucially, evolutionary psychologists believe that our prehistoric preoccupations still shape the form of the stories we enjoy. What is even more astonishing is the fact that it is read and enjoyed today, and that so many of its basic elements – including its heart-warming ‘bromance’ – can be found in so many of the popular stories that have come since. Why The Handmaid’s Tale is so relevant today We can assume that the story was enormously popular at the time, given that later iterations of the poem can be found over the next millennium. It is the Epic of Gilgamesh, engraved on ancient Babylonian tablets 4,000 years ago, making it the oldest surviving work of great literature. The fact that this tale is still being read today is itself remarkable. The king ends the battle chastened, and the two heroes become fast friends and embark on a series of dangerous quests across the kingdom. Enter a down-to-earth wayfarer who challenges him to fight. It sounds like the perfect summer blockbuster.Ī handsome king is blessed with superhuman strength, but his insufferable arrogance means that he threatens to wreak havoc on his kingdom.
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