New research from the University of St Andrews has developed a novel hypothesis of how firelight was critical to the evolution of sophisticated storytelling.

In a paper published today in Proceedings of the Royal Society, researchers from St Andrews, alongside colleagues from Dartmouth College, suggest that fireside storytelling may have provided the key catalyst to move human communication away from the ape-like systems our modern ape cousins still use today and toward our uniquely human use of language.

Charles Darwin described fire as man's greatest discovery, excepting language. Recent work has argued that these two touchstones of human evolution may be fundamentally entwined. While the importance of fireside storytelling for human societies has previously been recognized, earlier work assumed that stories emerged from an existing human proto-language.

This new work highlights how our current understanding of modern apes shows them capable of many of the fundamental basics of human communication and social problem-solving—from meaningful gestures to a theory of mind.

Researchers also argue that many of the day-to-day problems of life in a small social group can be solved without language.

The puzzle beyond ape communication
Lead author Catherine Hobaiter, professor in the School of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of St Andrews, said, "Decades of research with other species has shown us that you don't need language to learn from each other, to organize where and when to forage, to learn cultural knowledge about tools and songs, to coordinate hunting, or navigate social politics. It starts to look like human language didn't evolve for anything very useful!"

Hobaiter added, "While other species share all these skills, there is a fundamental puzzle: We struggle to find evidence of key differences between human and ape communication, and yet we are surrounded by evidence of human distinctiveness. For all their incredible, rich communication and cultures, no other ape is inventing algebra, writing King Lear or heading out into interstellar space."

The work argues that the first steps toward language may have emerged in fireside storytelling and goes on to provide one of the first descriptions of this fireside niche and how it could influence human behavior.