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Ancient Campfires Led To the Rise of Storytelling
sciencehabit writes A study of evening campfire conversations by the Ju/'hoan people of Namibia and Botswana suggests that by extending the day, fire allowed people to unleash their imaginations and tell stories, rather than merely focus on mundane topics. As scientists report, whereas daytime talk was focused almost entirely on economic issues, land rights, and complaints about other people, 81% of the firelight conversation was devoted to telling stories, including tales about people from other Ju/'hoan communities. The team suggests that campfires allowed human ancestors to expand their minds in a similar way and also solidified social networks.
The campfire gave rise to two things that permeate human society: religion and ghost stories.
Unfortunately, both are about equally grounded in reality and truth.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Show me one person who can look away from an open flame during a time of relaxation.
When they got home, the hook was still in the door handle.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Also the scientific method of formulating a hypothesis and performing an experiment to test it.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Thanks for the update!
I tried to hike the Pacific Crest Trail once, it's the one that runs from Mexico to Canada through the Desert, then the Sierras. We had to make 15-25+ miles without water (because there was none any closer), and that often meant hiking until or into the dark. I found that my whole appreciation of a campfire was very different than a marshmallow toasting boy scout at those times. As suggested by the summary, I craved the fire to "extend" the ability to talk to my girlfriend when we weren't hiking or preparing to hike, which was the entire day or longer. I suspect it was less ghost story telling and more story telling period. When you spend all the daylight gathering, hunting, getting water, setting up shelter, and preparing food the campfire is sort of like the original dinner table because everyone is there sharing. Not all the tasks were done by all the people, so the ability to come together and talk, perhaps not about "work" (survival) may have been an idea that sprouted back then. As an aside, I never use the word starving any longer, I think I experienced true early starvation for the first time out there. Early human life must have been gritty when things weren't bountiful.
That is interesting, please continue. Tell me s'more about these campfire activities.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
And then... Boo!
Ahhhhhhhhhh!
Table-ized A.I.
Wait, Facebook was invented around a campfire in Botswana?
Probably Al Gore again.
I read the same thing on a Bill Cosby album liner forty-five years ago.
And when they got home, there was a bloody hook attached to the cave door!
Oh, and in my day we had to make s'mores out of two flat rocks, mud, and bird shit. It tasted awful and broke our teeth which absessed because we didn't have dentists and we liked it!
There they were, sitting around telling stories to each other and someone said "Y'know, it's pretty fuckin' cold tonight."
"And dark," said another.
"Billy," said the first, "Can you form a committee and brainstorm this issue, see if you can figure something out?"
"Right on it!" said Billy. He always was a suck.
They also led to the rise of marshmallows, binge drinking and running around the fire naked.
God, I love camping.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I'm not sure this is true. We need to research this further. It's only 99 percent obvious, so clearly, we need more research. Where do we apply for a grant?
Cloudiot: A person who does not see offsite storage as a way to lose control over access to his or her own data.
... the Pope is a ... Oh damn, you guessed that already too?
I would argue that the first fisherman gave rise to storytelling. I can recall, as a boy, when Moby Dick was a minnow and captain hook had two hands. She was a big'in I tell yee.
With a fire, people are brought together as a community. There is not enough light to go hunting or engage in any other practical activity, but there is enough light to communicate with gestures and facial expressions as well as verbally. So people will engage in conversation, assuming they're not engaged in some other nocturnal activity, but for all we know they were doing that in the dark before they had fire.
And you get why society is broken.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
We've known this for a very long time. Longer than I've been here even.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
So The Croods were right?
I have noticed in myself and several others an extremely strong fear-reflex to orange eyeshine. The eyes need to appear suddenly, they must be perceived as being near, and most interesting -- it seems to peak out at an ruddy orange color. Blue and green are surprising, yellow can be alarming but into the orange there is an extreme response, a silent 'snap' in the upper spine like an electric shock followed by a sensation of warmth/adrenaline response. As a kid I would shine my flashlight into the bushes as I walked at night to find cats. Countless times I caught yellow or green reflections (even up close) I'd smile and say "gotcha!" Then one night I got a shine that was a dull ruddy orange, I think it was an old tomcat with cataracts... I was riveted to the spot with symptoms described above, with great effort I stepped backward then sideways, and (though I knew it was just a cat) found myself running home.
Didn't think about it for years... until I encountered a young girl who loved Fantasia 2000. She'd watch it over and over. But as one particular moment approached she would hide her eyes under a blanket or even jump behind the couch. It was this moment . After the Firebird rose up moments later she'd be fine, sitting down watching intently. I started asking around. At least one other person had a similar reaction to orange eyeshine, and several others when given a choice chose orange as the eye color they'd least like to encounter at night.
This led me into a theory. Imagine paleo-humans around a campfire. The adults exhausted or asleep from the strenuous activities of the day... but the children are alert and awake, keeping watch. They are watching for eyeshine on the fringes of camp. This makes sense because it is the children that predators are watching. Whether or not they were tasked with this duty, or even if it was an "eye game", it may be that we are descended from a successful lineage of children who kept watch at night and successfully sounded the alarm.
Before people huddled around campfires this eyeshine predator fear response could not have been so strongly tuned to orange as it seems to be. Reflected moonlight may give you a faint flash of eyeshine if conditions are right. But when you are between the fire and the eyes it would be really bright, and a predominately orange fire would reflect mainly its own color. Only with the modern electric light would we 'see' those brilliant greens and yellows. So an eyeshine predator fear response would have developed after we tamed fire. As such it might be the most recent base instinct, and because it arises from firelight -- exclusively human.
I have another theory too, it was the domestication of the canine that initially allowed us and our children to sleep through the night, leading into the elaborate REM sleep and dream cycle of modern humans that acts as a wellspring of intelligent creativity.
And it has scarcely been one hundred years since we were paced by animals.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
No question of it, I've been on multiple big camping trips, mobile phones banned, things like that - and we just had a big big fire in the middle, sat around talking, relaxing and staring at the warm glow of logs slowly crumbling. It's incredibly mesmerising when there's nothing else to look at. Very relaxing.
Drugs or alcohol may or may not assist but are not required!
domestication of the canine
In other words, the domestication of humans by the canine. They chose us, not the other way around.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
Duh! Night campfires ARE MADE for chatting, for what else?
So people could keep tabs of what others were doing out of sight, e.g. on the hunt or left back at home. And when family groups hunkered down in larger groups during winter camp, they could catch up with more distant relatives.
I heard this on Facebook. He-he. Social media is just the modern technological extension of primordial gossip.
Maybe because need to be more alert out in Nature. But I think its because 95% of human history centered around this.
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So the reason my dog tries to run and will bark in its sleep is because they caught dreaming from humans?
I suspect dreaming has been around longer than we have been human.
Some years ago my wife and I read Homer's Odyssey to each other over several nights, sitting outside next to a campfire. It really worked well. That's a story that is best told, not read. I wonder how much more effective it would be to cover ancient literature in this way: not read out of a book in classroom, but spoken out loud in a communal setting.