“Where Do Stories Come From?

In previous posts, we’ve looked at several aspects of the storytelling process, such as how stories affect the way we think and get along (think ‘oxytocin’), why we have this narrative impulse and what it does for us in an evolutionary sense.

In this post, I want to go further back into the mists of ancient times and find out where stories really come from. 

At the website TheWrap.com, author Mark Travis talks about the purpose of stories this way:

“But, where do stories come from?

“We tell stories every day – mostly to ourselves. We tell ourselves stories to make a point, to imagine a possible future, to remind ourselves, to reprimand ourselves, to comfort ourselves. Inside each and every one of us is a complex system of storytelling that is active, rich in content, and, I believe, very necessary to the health and wellbeing of each of us.

“This is where stories start, where they are conceived, gestate and are eventually born. Consequently, the story’s first teller is our self and the first listener is our self.

“A story is a series of events we either create or remember or imagine which we tell ourselves because we want or need to hear them. Perhaps we create stories because we want or need to know something, or learn something, or answer a question. Perhaps it is the listener within us that demands the story and the teller within us that does its best to accommodate.”

In other words, there is some primordial need to tell and hear stories, something essential to our mental health.  It seems to be as fundamental as air, water, food and sleep. 

I can imagine the beginnings of stories this way: a bunch of Australopithecines are gathered around a campfire, grunting and gesturing to each other, maybe re-living a recent hunt.  It seems reasonable that storytelling developed in concert with language.  Language started out as our primitive cousins grunting and gesturing to each other.  Gradually rules and conventions developed.  One series of sounds meant ‘move right to cut off the woolly mammoth we’re chasing.’  Another sound meant ‘close in for the kill.’

Then, after the successful hunt, the hunters co-opted the same sounds to re-live their hunt and devise better ways to do it in the future.  Maybe they even used the same sounds to imagine future hunts and hunts that might have been.  This is possibly how stories began. 

Another website, Storytellingday.net, has this to say:

“The storytelling history is quite ancient, lost in the mist of time. Nobody knows when the first story was actually told. Did it happen in the gloomy recess of a cave around a flickering fire told by a primitive hunter? Well, we may never know. But it is believed that (the) origin of storytelling may have come across as an excuse for failure. Perhaps stories were used long time ago to calm the fears or doubts of a family. As families grouped with other families and formed clans, the storyteller, who was good at telling heroic events or other important events of the tribe began to reach a position of respect and power. People found them interesting and began to listen to them. The priest, the judge and the ruler were perhaps the earliest to use this art effectively in the history of storytelling. Storytelling days were considered important.

“Before man learned to write, he had to rely on his memory to learn anything. For this he had to be a good listener. A good story teller was always respected. He could easily find an audience, eager to devour every exciting bit of information in their stories. These stories were also shared with others in faraway lands, when people traveled. The stories traveled with them. And when they returned home, they brought with them exciting new tales of exotic places and people.

“The oldest surviving tale in the storytelling history is the epic, Gilgamesh, relating to the deeds of a famous Sumerian king. The earliest known record in the origin of storytelling can be found in the Egypt, when the sons of Cheops entertained their father with stories.

“The history of storytelling reveals that the stories came in all varieties. Myths, legends of all kinds, fairy tales, trickster stories, fables, ghost tales, hero stories, and epic adventures, these stories were told, retold. Passing down from generations, these stories reflect the wisdom and knowledge of early people. There are stories often used to explain important but often confusing events and disasters in nature at those early times. For example - fire, storms, thunder, floods, tidal waves, lightning etc; It was common for people to believe in the stories of gods, which bound them to a common heritage and beliefs.

“In fact, it is believed by most historians and psychologists that storytelling is one of the many things that define and bind our humanity. Humans are perhaps the only animals that create and tell stories.”



To tell and listen to stories is to be human.  No other creature, that we know of, tells stories, though they do communicate in various ways.  Who knows: maybe when bees do their ‘waggle dance,’ they’re actually not just communicating the best route to a food source, but a little story about their adventures in getting there and back.  Unless we learn to speak ‘bee,’ we may never know.

We’ll explore the roots of storytelling and the elements of a good story more in upcoming posts. 


 In the next post to The Word Shed, I’ll excerpt one of the stories in my upcoming collection Colliding Galaxies, due out in mid-May 2017.



See you May 15.



Phil B.