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Oral Storytelling and Knowledge Transmission in Upper Paleolithic Children and Adolescents

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Abstract

The ways in which children learn in foraging societies differ from the classroom-based style of learning and teaching 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 paper, following Scalise Sugiyama (Evolution and Human Behavior 22:221–240, 2001), I argue that oral storytelling is a form of pedagogy in foraging societies that shares all of the key features of direct teaching including the signaling of an intention to share information, the identification of intended recipients of this information, and the transmission of knowledge that has applicability beyond the immediate context. I then review the evidence for storytelling/narrative in the Upper Paleolithic. Finally, I explore the implications of this form of teaching for skill acquisition and knowledge transmission in Upper Paleolithic children and adolescents.

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Notes

  1. See Price et al. (2015) for more details on the complexity of alarm and aggressive call production among vervets.

  2. There is limited evidence for the biological basis for speech in earlier hominins but this topic is beyond the scope of this paper.

  3. Less commonly a rondelle can be perforated on the perimeter (e.g., 3676 recorded at Las Caldas, see Corchon et al., 2008: 70).

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the following friends and colleagues for comments on this manuscript and/or for sharing photographs with me: Stanley Ambrose, Alison Brooks, Adam Brumm, Jean Clottes, Iain Davidson, and Claudio Tennie. A draft of this paper was presented as part of the University of Tübingen’s Hilgendorf Lecture Series.

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    April Nowell

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Nowell, A. Oral Storytelling and Knowledge Transmission in Upper Paleolithic Children and Adolescents. J Archaeol Method Theory 30, 9–31 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-022-09591-5

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