Prehistoric Stories

Archeology

Did humans tell stories in the time before writing was invented? Of course they did! But the proof that still exists for such prehistoric narratives is, as you can imagine, rather indirect.1 As such, if we want to know what kind of stories were told back then, we are faced with a difficult undertaking. But this undertaking is worth the effort, because tales – as we saw with our foray into the environmental humanities – have much to teach us about the human condition in any day and age.

This search for proof of prehistoric stories brings us once again to the very boundaries of the things archeology might be able to tell us about the distant past, just as with the first blog that I wrote for Bildungblocks! But what has been unearthed by archeologists in this regard – both literally and figuratively – is remarkable. And these findings constitute, one could say, a fascinating story in their own right.

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Prehistoric Achievements

The lack of pyramids, ziggurats, or great walls does not indicate that the prehistoric achievements of humankind were any less impressive. On the contrary! Even with regard to the time when humans lacked both writing and systematic agriculture, around fourteen-thousand or so years ago, there were already the hunter-gatherers that build the mysterious carved monoliths and associated dwellings at Göbekli Tepe.2 And those living in the first sedentary settlements, such as the proto-city at ÇatalhöyĂŒk with its famous rectangular houses that could only be entered through their roofs, maintained a sophisticated social organization without recourse to writing.3 But we humans – or, more accurately, us Homo Sapiens – are not the only animals who belong to genus Homo to have walked the earth.4 And these other deceased human species had some nifty prehistoric achievements of their own. Achievements that involved means, such as advanced forms of communication, that are less visible in our archeological record.5 Those of our forebears that were given the name Homo Erectus, for instance, needed an impressive level of coordination and craft to cross the large bodies of water we know they traversed.6 And the hominids that were once our contemporaries, such as the Neanderthals and Denisovans, managed to follow Erectus’ footsteps and spread out across the world, where they survived all the verisimilitudes of nature they had to endure, and made the most of their many encounters with inimical flora and fauna.7 The challenges that defined their lives and the marvelous ways in which they overcame them, do not differ all that much from the trials and tribulations that were faced by modern humans from the outset.

These remarkable achievements by all human species were at least in part made possible by one of the most prominent ways in which we as a genus differ from other animals. This is our ability to engage in imaginative and pretend play. Such “[f]antasy play is part of a package of symbol-based cognitive abilities that includes self-awareness, language, and theory of mind.”8 Play is, of course, a category that is notoriously difficult to define. As anybody whose parent(s) ever proposed that a new game could involve doing the dishes, vacuuming the floor or cleaning bicycles, can attest to! Behaviors often fit this category, among other criteria, when there is a positive affect involved, when they are performed for their own sake, and when their form and content are flexible.9 Though play can be said to retain a role in the life of human adults – just put on the tv in the summer of 2024! – it is in the first place a crucial tool that aids the upbringing of children.10 In a prehistoric context, one can think of adults (unwittingly) setting examples for their children to emulate during play or when children try out skills like knapping stone out together – with the emphasis on trying!11 There is also another valuable instrument in this regard. An instrument which is made possible, at least in part, by play – while at the same time constituting an arguably essential prerequisite to develop the use of our imagination, which we need to play in the first place – storytelling.12

Prehistoric Storytelling

Education, as a part of our upbringing, provides a scaffold for those on the receiving end. When you are educated, you get to know much information and acquire many skills, which you don’t have to find out for yourself. In other words, you get a head start in life that is made possible by an introduction to what previous generations learned through their own experiences or their communication with each other and those that came before them. In this respect, education is perhaps the most pertinent part of the continuation of organized behaviors, which we colloquially call ‘culture’.13 This valuable dissemination of ideas and practices can be facilitated through storytelling – as it probably was in prehistoric times.14

There may therefore be well-argued reasons for the existence of storytelling in prehistoric societies – and this seems to be confirmed, in as far as that is possible in this way, by those who still live as hunters and gatherers in the present day – but can we know anything about the narratives that were actually told? Well, the relevant evidence is mostly circumstantial.15 The changes that archeologists observe in prehistoric cave art, for example, perhaps reflected different directions in the local storytelling.16 That some animals ceased to be depicted and others freshly appeared may indicate their respective diminishing and ascending role in the tales that were told. And because archeologists have insight in the actual diets of these people, we can rule out that such changes are merely of the dietary variety!17 Furthermore, the sometimes peculiar additions to these animals, including extra legs and other suggestions of movement, as well as the hints to an ongoing narrative told throughout different panels, can be interpreted as evidence that these images represented stories.18 For those who really doubt that we deal with a proper narrative instead of mere hunting instructions or reports, there is the truly fantastical – both visible within the recovered cave art as well as on the earlier introduced monoliths at Göbekli Tepe.19 There are, for instance mythical beasts, like unicorns and anthropomorphic birds, and humans that appear to have been blended with animals. Visuals which could only have originated in someone’s imagination.20

If we concede that these clues indeed point to the stories that were told in prehistoric times, then this indirect evidence reveals a few prolific themes, specifically centering the power of the animal world and nature more generally.21 And this should not come as a surprise, because many of the challenges of the prehistoric world centered on the environment persons encountered. If we return our gaze to southern Anatolia, where the aforementioned proto-city of ÇatalhöyĂŒk was situated, we find frescoes that continue the themes that appeared to be expressed through the earlier cave art and monoliths.22 Such expressions thereby suggest the enduring legacies of the stories which were told back then. Just how enduring these legacies were, becomes visible when writing enters the scene. The very same preoccupations, so reasons Louise Westling, inform famous stories from, amongst other places, the Aegean and Mesopotamia. Even if those writers lived thousands of years removed from the prehistoric hunter-gatherer societies that made the cave art we study today and carved the monoliths at Göbekli Tepe, or even from those persons that painted the frescoes in proto-cities like ÇatalhöyĂŒk. Westling mentions examples like the famous Gilgamesh Epic – wherein nature, animals, and fantastic beasts play prominent roles, as we saw in a previous blog – and the tales about ancient Greek deities that informed the tragedies of, amongst others, Euripides.23 Perhaps the stories of prehistory are lost, but they were certainly not forgotten.

Conclusion: The Stories Must Go On

Though we may mourn that the prehistoric stories necessarily prolong their enduring silence, it turned out that we can grasp at their existence and even tentatively establish some of the more prolific themes. Themes that continued to play a part in many of the preserved narratives that would follow and that have been told and retold until the present day. As a result, many of the adventurous heroes and mystical animals that grace the volumes in modern book stores and the films in movie theaters, to name but a few examples, would not feel out of place if they appeared on ancient cave paintings or ditto monoliths and frescoes.24 So that is one retort you can use, the next time someone complains that contemporary literature and the current movie landscape confine themselves to rethreading old material: many characters and themes that preoccupy our narratives have probably been in vogue since the most distant of pasts!

If you want to learn more about the life of our forebears in prehistoric times and their propensity for telling stories, I highly recommend April Nowell’s Growing Up in the Ice Age, especially chapter 5, and Louise Westling’s Deep History, Climate Change, and the Evolution of Human Culture.25 Both books also provide a wealth of further literature, which I gratefully sifted through while writing this blog. Soon(ish) we are therefore going to address the matter why I still bother to busy myself with such literary reviews or writing these blogs at all – and in two languages at that! – while it appears that we can increasingly leave conducting scholarship and popularizing both older and fresh knowledge to large language models like ChatGPT and its ilk. Will these so-called generative A.I.’s soon replace Bildungblocks?

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References

  1. April Nowell, Growing Up in the Ice Age: Fossil and Archaeological Evidence of the Lived Lives of Plio-Pleistocene Children (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2021), p. 107.
  2. Chris Scarre, “The World Transformed: From Foragers and Farmers to States and Empires,” in: Chris Scarre (ed.), The Human Past: World Prehistory and the Development of Human Societies, (London: Thames & Hudson, 2018), p. 188; Trevor Watkins, “From Mobile Foragers to Complex Societies in Southwest Asia”, in: Chris Scarre (ed.), The Human Past: World Prehistory and the Development of Human Societies, (London: Thames & Hudson, 2018), p. 210-211, 216-217.
  3. Louise Westling, Deep History, Climate Change, and the Evolution of Human Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), p. 42-45; Watkins, “From Mobile Foragers to Complex Societies in Southwest Asia”, p. 220-223.
  4. To say nothing of those other forebears, like the genus Australopthicus and the genus Paranthropus among others, see: Westling, Deep History, Climate Change, and the Evolution of Human Culture, p. 15.
  5. Nicholas Toth & Kathy Schick, “African Origins”, in: Chris Scarre (ed.), The Human Past: World Prehistory and the Development of Human Societies (London: Thames & Hudson, 2018), p. 65; Maeve G. Leakey, The Sediments of Time: My Lifelong Search for the Past, written with Samira Leakey (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020), p. 248-249.
  6. Westling, Deep History, Climate Change, and the Evolution of Human Culture, p. 23. For the indications that Homo Erectus needed to have managed sea travel despite the lower water tables at that time, see: Ibidem; Ryan J. Rabett, Human Adaptation in the Asian Palaeolithic: Hominin Dispersal and Behaviour during the Late Quaternary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 56-58.
  7. Westling, Deep History, Climate Change, and the Evolution of Human Culture, p. 27-28.
  8. Nowell, Growing Up in the Ice Age, p. 48.
  9. Peter K. Smith, Children and Play: Understanding Children’s Worlds (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), p. 6; Nowell, Growing Up in the Ice Age, p. 47.
  10. I refer here of course to the UEFA European soccer championship and other sporting events that took place in the summer of 2024, see: Pepijn de Lange, “Meer Landen, Meer Wedstrijden, Meer Geld: EK Duitsland Levert UEFA Recordinkomsten Op”, deVolkskrant June 14th 2024, Ten Eerste, p. 8.
  11. Nowell, Growing Up in the Ice Age, p. 95-103.
  12. Lillehammer, Grete, “A Child Is Born: The Child’s World in an Archaeological Perspective”, Norwegian Archaeological Review 1989, 22 (2), p. 84; Nowell, Growing Up in the Ice Age, p. 48; Michelle Scalise Sugiyama, “Oral Storytelling as Evidence of Pedagogy in Forager Societies”, Frontiers in Psychology 2017, 8 (471), p. 1-9.
  13. Westling, Deep History, Climate Change, and the Evolution of Human Culture, p. 19. And such expressions of culture are not confined to human species, see: Carl Safina, Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel. (New York: Henry Holt & Company, 2015), p. 86-92.
  14. Nowell, Growing Up in the Ice Age, p. 106. For storytelling as a human universal, see: Sugiyama, “Oral Storytelling as Evidence of Pedagogy in Forager Societies”, p. 9.
  15. Nowell, Growing Up in the Ice Age, p. 107-108.
  16. Jean Clottes, “Thematic Changes in Upper Palaeolithic Art: A View from the Grotte Chauvet”, Antiquity 1996, 70 (268), p. 287.
  17. Nowell, Growing Up in the Ice Age, p. 107. See in general: Paul G. Bahn, Images of the Ice Age (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2016).
  18. Nowell, Growing Up in the Ice Age, p. 111; Marc AzĂ©ma & Florent RiviĂšre, “Animation in Palaeolithic Art: A Pre-Echo of Cinema”, Antiquity 2012, 86 332), 317-318, 323.
  19. Westling, Deep History, Climate Change, and the Evolution of Human Culture, p. 46.
  20. Nowell, Growing Up in the Ice Age, p. 112-113; Elizabeth V. Culley, “A Comparison of ‘Scenes’ in Parietal and Non-Parietal Upper Paleolithic Imagery: Formal Differences and Ontological Implications”, in: Iain Davidson & April Nowell (eds.), Making Scenes: Global Perspectives on Scenes in Rock Art (New York, Berghahn Books, 2021), p. 188.
  21. Westling, Deep History, Climate Change, and the Evolution of Human Culture, p. 40, 46-48.
  22. Notwithstanding the differences, which encompass the depiction of domesticated animals, see: Ian Hodder, The Leopard’s Tale: Revealing the Mysteries of ÇatalhöyĂŒk (London: Thames & Hudson, 2006), p. 86–88, 235, 255); Westling, Deep History, Climate Change, and the Evolution of Human Culture, p. 47.
  23. Ibidem, p. 45, 51, 54.
  24. Louise M. Pryke, Gilgamesh (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019), p. 202-205; 15, Marina Warner, Fairy Tale: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), p. 15, 20-21.
  25. Nowell, Growing Up in the Ice Age; Westling, Deep History, Climate Change, and the Evolution of Human Culture.