three ways humans represent the world

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   there were three ways in which humans represented the world:

   (or, better, three ways of capturing experiences and action that we call “reality”)

     • One was by enaction;

        • action routines (dance, creature of habit, ritual, theatre, play, workshop, ...)

     • a second through imagery;

        • in pictures (scribble, sketching, drawing, story board, comic books, movies, films)

     • and a third through constructing symbolic systems.

        • in symbols (written language, sign, ...) 

     • story telling, oral tradition, camp fire, radio, podcast, ???  

  ◇ The shift in perception_X redefines “knowledge.”

     (a.) Acting involves       changing our behavior,

     (b.) Reframing involves    changing our thinking, and

     (c.) Transforming involves changing our perceptions_A.

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Edward O. Wilson, The origins of creativity, 2017

pp.23─24

   In the evening the mood relaxes.  In the chiaroscuro firelight, the talk turns to story telling, which drifts easily into singing, dancing, and religious ceremonies.  Storytelling, especially among the men, turns frequently to sucessful hunts and epic adventures, their dominant daytime activity.  

As described by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas in her 2006 classic The old way : a story of the first people,  the stories are (or once were) commonly mythlike accounts of actual hunts.  They were recited over and over, by men in special voices, becoming almost chants, to which everyone listened.  There follows one such story, in the actual words of the hunter, of how an antelope is taken down by a poison arrow.  I especially like it, even in full translation, because it could be a performance made one hundred thousand years earlier.  As paleontologists reconstruct extinct animal species from skeletons, it seems possible to reconstruct ancient social life from such least evolved progenitors. 

 

   Ai!  What?  Is that an ear?   Yes, an ear!  There's his ear against the sky, he's in bushes, just there, the edge of the bushes.  I watch it.  Yes, it moves, he turns a little, a little, hi!  he lifts his head, he's worried, he sniffs, he knows!  He looks, I'm down low, down low, just very quiet, down low, he doesn't see me!  He's safe, he thinks.  He turns around.  I am behind him.  HE creep forward, eh!  I creep I creep, I am just that far, eh!  just that from me to there, quiet, quiet, I'm quiet, I'm slow, I have my bow, I set the arrow.  Ai!  I shoot.  Waugh!  I hit him!  He jumps.  Ha ha!  He jumps!  He runs.  He's gone!  I shot him.  Right here, just here the arrow went in.  He jumped, he run that way, going that way, but I got him. 

   Storytelling, including especially recorded tales of successful hunts and epic adventures, consumed 6 percent of the overall recorded time during the day, but they consumed 81 per cent of the evening.  The overall effect was to convey the big picture of the group's existence.  It united them into a rule-based community with a single culture.  

Edward O. Wilson, The origins of creativity, 2017

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πόλλ' οἶδ' ἀλώπηξ,ἀλλ' ἐχῖνος ἓν μέγα πόλλ' οἶδ' ἀλώπηξ,ἀλλ' ἐχῖνος ἓν μέγα