The Back Story on Storytelling 🦄 – the keepmoving.company

All humans, including you, are storytellers by definition. Even if you believe you aren’t good at [public speaking, talking to strangers, presenting, pitching, etc.], you are genetically designed to be a storyteller; it’s in our DNA. Epigenetically speaking, we are evolved to share stories.

Couple historic facts about the origins of human storytelling you may already know.

Here’s a summary of how our storytelling has evolved and continues to evolve.

1. Prehuman Foundations

Prehuman species (before Homo sapiens) displayed capacities for understanding, recalling, and communicating events—mainly through mimetic (imitative) methods, such as gestures, facial expressions, and vocalizations, but not true language or narrative. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih+1
Today, we use this as nonverbal signals that we send almost without thought, at least not consciously. Reading someone’s body language is a good example of how this translates to today. It’s a super intuitive component of understanding a person before they speak. I reference this in my Five Slide Rule training as the 3Ps: Poise, Presence, Posture. Even allegedly introverted humans are naturally (DNA-wise) inclined to demonstrate communication using body language.

2. Emergence of Language

The pressure for complex social cooperation among Homo erectus and later hominids led to the invention of language.
Spoken language began to develop around 500,000 years ago (in Homo heidelbergensis), allowing for richer, more precise communication. humanjourney+1
So when storytelling, consider a half a million years of 20,000 human generations of our predecessors communicated precisely for our literal survival. Our inheritance is huge, so when you are nervous or feel like you struggle, remember if there is no struggle there is no progress. Staying out of your comfort zone makes you more robust, resilient and ready. Ready for anything, stories aside, learning and storytelling go hand in hand.

3. Proto-Narrative Communication

Venus of Berekhat Ram

Gestures, postures, and expressions provided early means for sharing stories and information before the concept of whole language emerged.
Artistic expressions such as cave paintings, carvings, and figurines (e.g., Venus of Berekhat Ram, dating up to 800,000 years ago) served as preliterate storytelling and symbol creation. wikipedia+1
When you consider the cave paintings and figurines, as well as how early narratives evolved, you can see that even people who could not read or write still managed to share something with others. At this early point, we installed the ‘pictures are worth a 1000 words’ model in our primitive but evolving brains. When you consider that our earliest relatives had literally stone tools, a pack mentality, and lived until perhaps 30 years of age, this point in our evolution has left behind us emojis that are relevant to today. 🦄 ❤️

4. Oral Storytelling Traditions

With the evolution of spoken language, stories could be shared orally, recounting history, myth, and lessons—from ancient times to tribal societies.
These oral traditions played a crucial role in education, memory, and social cohesion, often accompanied by music, dance, and the visual arts. deanfrancispress+1
The oral story was the first and still the best method we have; now, language and translation even change meaning, but the core of our humanity lies in story. Narratives create the foundations on which our entire society is based. Gilgamesh, the Bible, Religion, government —you name it —and I can tell you a story about it.

5. Written Storytelling

The invention of writing (approx. 5,000 years ago) enabled stories to become permanent, documented, and widely distributed.
Media for stories evolved: stone tablets, papyrus, paper, carvings, textiles, and eventually electronic forms. wikipedia
While many of the early tellings of stories turned into writing/reading, it created a collection of shared experiences with narratives engineered to be a binding agent for a civilizing population of humans, moving from hunter-gatherers to domesticating farmers. The moment we stopped living off the land and moving in bands of approximately 150 people, we began the process of learning how to live and codify storytelling in physical form. Even this chapter is itself an ode to someone 5,000 years ago on a Monday on this landmass between two oceans, perhaps someone keeping notes at the Valley of the Kings in that spot on the Nile. To them I can say, write, sculpt, paint a picture of how grateful I am to be here with such gifts.

6. Development of Fiction and Myth

With imaginative abilities fostered by language and play, humans began to invent fiction—stories that transcend factual experience to explore possible worlds, myths, and religions.
These stories further shaped cognition, culture, and social structures. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih+1
Again I believe that to ‘explain’ the world around us and all phenomena human storytelling has hit the jackpot in terms of expanding the minds ability to rationalize, fictionalize and describe the things that we didn’t or don’t understand. Using this evolving superpower to manifest in a story all the truths, facts, fictions that compel, arrest and entertain reinforces at least for me that story forming and broadcast make this part of our human experience amazing.

7. Technological Storytelling

Printing, broadcasting, film, and digital technologies revolutionized the scale, methods, and audience of storytelling, making it a global and multimedia phenomenon. iliyanastareva
Today, in modern storytelling, the mechanisms are diverse and vary significantly, both positively and negatively. My only commentary is that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Regardless of the mechanism, quality storytelling is the same the world over. Narrative arcs and distribution vehicles of every type will come and go, but the fundamental connection and the creation of compelling stories are in our nature, and I would go so far as to say it’s in our DNA.

Summary Table

Milestone	Approximate Timeframe	Main Features
Mimetic/prelinguistic	1.5M–0.5M yrs ago	Gestures, imitation, art for expression pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih+1
Language invention	~500,000 yrs ago	Spoken language develops, enabling narrative pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih+1
Oral story traditions	Ancient civilizations	Myths, legends, rituals, music, dance deanfrancispress+1
Written storytelling	~5,000 yrs ago	Stories recorded on physical media, written languages wikipedia
Emergence of fiction	After oral traditions	Use of imagination, myth, and religion pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih+1
Technological storytelling	Modern era	Print, broadcast, film, digital tech iliyanastareva

These milestones highlight how storytelling evolved from simple prelinguistic expressions to a defining feature of human culture and cognition, influencing collective memory, imagination, and social organization.

So What?

As it turns out, you and most people you know are the beneficiaries of all this history. What is so interesting about storytelling is how we tell stories in various ways and the numerous applications and techniques, as I have written about here. The level of storytelling you might use is wide and varied. The key takeaway here is that you have all you need to tell a story. The only thing you need is purpose and deliberate practice.

Story is one of the key elements of human experience that binds us. The ideas and concepts we are trying to share with colleagues and others are core to understanding how to effectively convey these ideas and concepts in narrative form.

Sources: