# ADSactly Folklore: Campfire stories

*Hello again dear @adsactly readers!*
*Over the past few months I have dedicated much of my folklore series to the study of various myths and stories, searching for common motifs and the cultural links between apparently different people. However, to better understand this complex topic we need to look back, far far away into the past, to the moment our cultural heritage of myths and legends was just starting to emerge.*
*We’ve talked about many stories, but when did stories actually appear?*

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_{[source](https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/09/ancient-campfires-led-rise-storytelling)}</center>

According to scientists, the apparition of the first stories can be traced back to the moment primitive people mastered fire. A momentous event in the evolution of mankind, which happened some 400.000 years ago.
When the primitives started to use fire, this changed not only their diet, but also their habits. The days became longer as people huddled around the open fire and, since they were all there, they were more inclined to share experiences. Just as you and I talk to our partners over diner. *'How was your day? A most extraordinary thing happened today on the way to work.''*
A close encounter with a lion or the discovery of some fruit tree just over the hill were all experiences worth sharing. Naturally, over time, the stories were embellished, the guy who fought off the lion became a hero and the apples became golden, and there was this ogre guarding them.

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_{[source](https://www.google.com/search?q=bushmen&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj2qKbgmt3jAhWtVN8KHUKBC-MQ_AUIESgB&biw=1366&bih=632#imgrc=bv7-Pu-z5Jua6M:)}</center>

The theory that men learned to tell stories as they spent their evenings by the fire was put forth by American anthropologist Polly Wiesner, who has studied the Bushmen of Namibia and Botswana for the past four decades. When she first met the Bushmen, in the 1970s, they lived much like Neanderthals, as hunter-gatherers, wandering from place to place in search of food. And they spent the evenings around campfires.
As every other community, they had problems and complaints about everyday life, but they dealt with those during daytime conversations.
Most of the quiet time in the evening, some 80% in fact, was devoted to telling stories, legends of their tribe or personal anecdotes, interesting enough to be worth retelling.
> “Stories told by firelight put listeners on the same emotional wavelength, elicited understanding, trust, and sympathy.”

In her study published in **Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences**, Wiesner says that “the power of the flame is reproduced in our homes through fireplaces and candles.”
Today the Bushmen in this study no longer live as hunter-gatherers. Now they’ve become farmers and live in villages. Who knows if they still spend their evenings by the fire?

Another important factor to consider when considering the origins of the art of story-telling is, of course, the apparition of spoken language. So, primitive men discovered fire some 400.000 years ago, but how did they communicate with each other back then. So far, scientists have been unable to come up with a definitive answer. There are those who maintain spoken language appeared 200,000 years ago, while others believe men learned to talk only 50,000 years ago, when Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens coexisted.
Apparently, this leaves us with a 200,000 years gap, when primitives huddled around the fire in total silence, since they had no spoken language!
However, most anthropologists believe that before spoken language, primitives developed an elaborate sign language. Presumably, not for the purpose of telling stories, but out of sheer necessity, to warn one another about dangers or to coordinate their hunt. *'Watch out, there’s a snake right behind you!''*

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_{[source](https://www.historicmysteries.com/campfire-communication/)}</center>

One theory was that Neanderthals mastered a very complex sign language, which allowed them to communicate as well as we do today. A language they used to establish each tribe’s member tasks for the day, perform rituals or express feelings.

The first stories told around the fire were probably told in this sign language, punctuated by various sounds. The notion might seem a bit funny, but, if you think about it, we also do it when telling stories to our children. Tapping your fingers on the bed-stand to indicate a knock on the door or smacking your lips with comical emphasis to show just how happy was the wolf when he ate Red Riding Hood’s granny.
As I’ve been saying in previous posts we’re not that different from our primitive ancestors as we might like to believe!

Speaking of stories, the classical ones many generations before us grew up with, a new study indicates that the oldest tales we know today are some 6000 years old.
Sure, most of the classics were gathered by the Grimm Brothers or other folklorists, but they are far older than a mere couple of centuries.
The study, published by the Royal Society Open Science, analyses a massive online repository of more than 2000 distinct tales from various Indo-European cultures.
> The experts believe that all modern Indo-European cultures (encompassing all of Europe and much of Asia) descended from the Proto-Indo-European people who lived during the Neolithic Period (10,200 B.C.E.–2000 B.C.E.) in Eastern Europe. Much of the world’s modern language is thought to have evolved from them.

Using the same technique biologists employ to trace DNA sequences, linguists tried to work their way back in time to determine the common ancestor of a story that appears across many cultures. Only, instead of DNA, they used language, specifically the various languages that evolved from the ancient Proto-Indo-European.

>This approach allowed the researchers to trace certain tales, such as ‘The Smith and the Devil’, which tells the story of a blacksmith who makes a deal with the devil in exchange for unmatched smithing prowess, back thousands of years—all the way to the Proto-Indo-European people. If the analysis is correct,it would mean the oldest fairy tales still in circulation today are between 2500 and 6000 years old.
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Not all the old stories have survived the test of time. According to Jamshid Tehrani, an anthropologist at Durham University in the United Kingdom, who conducted this study, the key to the persistence of a story over thousands of years is the right combination of strange elements (magic, for instance) and not-to-strange elements (romance, family).
**’The Beauty and the Beast’** is a perfect example, says Tehrani. There’s magic, the prince changed into a monster, but there’s also love, the girl’s anguish over her father’s fate and, also, an easily-relatable moral to the story - do not judge people by their looks.
If you’re interested, according to this study, at the core of our folkloric heritage there’s a group of 76 fairy tales that go back thousands of years.
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**Post authored by @ladyrebecca.**
**References:** [1](https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/09/ancient-campfires-led-rise-storytelling), [2](https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/04/some-fairy-tales-may-be-6000-years-old?fbclid=IwAR1ajJVoD-ZaJwQutmxE2BX9-8ijKk5w59fXu8MNXG_lP0JlXT3Aa_zRyzI)</center>