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The George Odell Lambda Alpha Lecture Series: Prof. April Nowell
January 23, 4:00 pm-5:00 pm
TU community join the Department of Anthropology for The George Odell Lambda Alpha Lecture Series with Prof. April Nowell from the University of Victoria, BC.
THE STORIES WE TELL: CHILDREN, ORAL STORYTELLING, AND KNOWLEDGE TRANSMISSION IN THE EUROPEAN UPPER PALEOLITHIC
Whether around a campfire, in a café, or in a sold-out theater, storytelling is ubiquitous in human culture. The universality of storytelling suggests that this behavior has deep roots. It also begs the question of why we as humans find stories so compelling and what the evolutionary context for this behavior might be. How children learn in foraging societies differs from the classroom-based learning and teaching style 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 share 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.