The Storyteller Before the Page
Before there was the page, there was the voice. Before the voice, there was only the moment itself, lived once, and then gone forever…. Unless someone found a way to make it last.
Eventually, every culture on Earth figured out how; through telling stories.
Take for example, a hunt. It could be survived once, and a warning could be felt once. But a story about the hunt, about the warning, could be felt again and again, by people who were never there. This is the origin of oral tradition; long before writing existed, storytelling was already doing the work of creating memories.
Previously, we have explored games as a way to rehearse action, such as strategy, conflict resolution, and risk taking. This piece proposes the notion that stories rehearsed meaning. A method developed to allow us to live and learn through moments without having to firstly, survive them ourselves.
But here’s the kick: none of this would have lasted the test of time if it wasn’t, in some way, enjoyable to hear.
Then and now, a story that bores its listeners dies with them. The ones that survived time, that got told again at the next fire, by the next storyteller, to the next generation, were the ones worth listening to. Think; pleasure wasn’t an accident of oral tradition, but instead a part of the selection pressure. Essentially; entertainment is the reason anything got remembered at all.
1. The First Known Story
Before we dive into the intricacies of oral tradition, we must look back to the first evidence for storytelling. As oral communication could not be saved for later before the rise of modern technology, we must consider the historical background of what we can tangibly study. This is visual storytelling.
In 2017, in a limestone cave on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, researchers found the oldest evidence of human storytelling known to date. Painted in red pigment on a cave wall is a scene: three human-like figures, carrying what appear to be tools, surrounding and confronting what is possibly a pig. Using uranium-series dating technology, researchers found this depiction to be 51,200 years old, “which is the earliest known surviving example of representational art, and visual storytelling, in the world”. (1)
Not the oldest drawing, but the oldest story. That distinction is worth noting down due to the fact that earlier cave art does exist. This includes visual remnants of isolated handprints, single animals, and geometric marks. But, a single figure on a wall is a record. Whereas a group of figures, composed together, acting upon one another with intent, is a narrative.
But if a hunt can be remembered without being painted, why paint it at all? This raises the idea that it could have been a choice to render the moment as a scene; images composed in relation to one another and to be looked at and digested by others, maybe even ignite emotion in the viewer, which in itself could be recognised as a decision for entertainment.
2. The Living Library
If cave paintings show us that storytelling is ancient, the griots of West Africa show us how it can spread. Specifically, how it can spread through space and time, and how society can build an entire institution around it.
A griot is altogether a historian, a poet, a musician, an advisor, and a diplomat. A living archive or an oral record keeper, if you will. The position of griot is typically passed down through generations, and they are known to maintain the social fabric of their societies by imparting tales, offering advice, and mediating disputes using lessons from the past. Stories about hunting techniques, weather patterns, natural dangers, and resource basins are traditionally told through tales, sound, and musical performances, ways that made it easier for the listener to remember. Over time, information is passed along with each griot adding their own perspective and connecting the tales to their own lives, and the lives of their audience.
Thus, a griot’s job is never only to remember, it is also to perform the remembering, and perform it well enough so that people want to listen. You could almost argue, within this example, that history didn’t survive despite showmanship, but actually because of it, because of the ability of storytellers to make an audience feel something, hence creating a story worth remembering.
Within this example, in the time of the 13th century from which the role originated, the stakes of showmanship were real. A griot who could not hold a room, whose voice faltered, whose timing missed, whose music failed to move anyone, risked their version of events being forgotten in favour of a livelier one, told by someone else, at the next gathering, in the next community. Within this example, entertainment wasn’t the decoration on top of history, it was the mechanism that decided whose version of history got carried forward.
3. Story as Identity and Belonging
Next to how stories were carried by individuals, is the consideration of how they were carried by entire groups of people, over whole continents and through the centuries. For this, we will refer to the practice of Songlines by Aboriginal Australian and Torres Straight Islander communities.
In Indigenous Australian culture, Songlines, also known as Dreaming tracks, are a form of oral memory where geographical and mythical details are memorized through song. Using Songlines, people could pass important information about weather patterns, astronomy, animal behaviour, locate waterholes, food supplies, and safe shelter, centuries before any other kind of working map existed.
But, Songlines do more than guide a community from one waterhole to the next. They embody a relationship that transcends mere geography, encompassing spirituality, identity, a deep connection with the land, and cultural resilience. Songlines tell people who they are, where they came from, and who came before them. It functions as a means of passing knowledge and customs from elders to younger generations, reinforcing identity with every retelling. Walked and sung by individuals as well as groups, it is a shared and repeatable experience. Within this example, entertainment isn’t a separate layer added on top of survival or identity, but can be considered the delivery mechanism for both.
4. From Kin to Crowd
And if this all sounds distant, ancient, or like ‘somebody else’s’ tradition, consider how little the function has truly changed.
The same identity-work still happens, just in smaller rooms and shorter formats. Consider the story your family retells every holiday, passed down through parents to kids, to grandkids, the one that’s been exaggerated a little more each year, until no one’s quite sure what actually happened. Consider the version of your country’s history taught in school, edited and re-edited depending on who’s telling it and who the victors of a conflict were. Consider the personal narrative you reach for when someone asks who you are and where you’re from, the one you’ve polished through repetition until it sounds less like memory and more like a recited legend or even a myth.
We didn’t outgrow these historical vessels of passing important information, we just shrank it down to fit a dinner table rather than stretch it to span a country.
Of course however, the format has changed. The page replaced the voice and the screen replaced the page, but the function carried straight through: a story, told well enough to survive being told again and again to remind us of who we are, where we came from, and where we are headed.
So, when did stories stop needing entertainment to evolve? When did they become just that; entertainment?
Notice who’s been in the room for this journey: A griot performs for people who belong to the history being sung. A Songline is walked by people who belong to the land being described. Teller and listener are different roles, certainly, the griot already proved that, but they’re not yet different worlds. The audience in these cases, aren’t watching a story happen to strangers, they’re hearing their own story, sung back to them.
However, somewhere ahead in time the story stoped being something an audience already belongs to, and started turning into something they merely watch: A spectacle performed for people with no stake in it at all, no ancestry in it, and no place in its outcome. Somewhere along the line of human history, stories became entertainment for strangers, gathered to watch something that isn’t theirs.
That’s where this symposium goes to next: to what humanity built once watching a story became something you could do without belonging to it. ◆