Teaching is hypothesized to be a species-typical behavior in humans that contributed to the emergence of cumulative culture. Several within-culture studies indicate that foragers depend heavily on social learning to acquire practical skills and knowledge, but it is unknown whether teaching is universal across forager populations. Teaching can be defined ethologically as the modification of behavior by an expert in the presence of a novice, such that the expert incurs a cost and the novice acquires skills/knowledge more efficiently or that it would not acquire otherwise. One behavioral modification hypothesized to be an adaptation for teaching is ostensive communication—exaggerations of prosody and gesture that signal intent to transmit generalizable knowledge and indicate the intended receiver. On this view, the use of ostensive communication in conjunction with the transmission of generalizable knowledge constitutes evidence of teaching. Oral storytelling appears to meet these criteria: Indigenous peoples regard their traditions as important sources of ecological and social knowledge, and oral storytelling is widely reported to employ paralinguistic communication. To test this hypothesis, descriptions of performed narrative in forager societies were coded for the use of 14 ostensive-communicative behaviors and the presence of generalizable knowledge. Although biased toward North America, the study sample comprised 53 forager cultures spanning five continents, 34 language families, and diverse biomes. All cultures evinced the predicted behaviors. Results suggest that foragers use storytelling as a mode of instruction, thus providing cross-cultural evidence of teaching in forager populations.

教学被假设为人类的物种典型行为，有助于累积文化的出现。几项文化内研究表明，觅食者严重依赖社会学习来获取实用技能和知识，但尚不清楚教学是否在觅食者群体中普遍存在。教学可以从行为学上定义为专家在新手在场的情况下改变行为，这样专家会产生成本，而新手更有效地获得技能/知识，否则就不会获得。一种被假设为适应教学的行为改变是明示交流- 夸张的韵律和手势，表明意图传输可概括的知识并指示预期的接收者。在这种观点下，明示交流的使用与概括性知识的传播相结合构成了教学的证据。口述故事似乎符合这些标准：土著人民将他们的传统视为生态和社会知识的重要来源，并且广泛报道口述故事使用副语言交流。为了验证这一假设，对觅食者社会中所进行的叙述的描述被编码为使用 14 种明示交流行为和普遍性知识的存在。尽管偏向北美，但研究样本包括跨越五大洲、34 个语言家族和不同生物群落的 53 种觅食文化。所有文化都表现出预测的行为。结果表明，觅食者使用讲故事作为一种教学模式，从而提供了在觅食人群中进行教学的跨文化证据。