Nobody knows when the first story was told. Spoken words vanish as they’re said, so the oldest stories left no trace. Here’s what does survive. A painted scene in a cave on Sulawesi, Indonesia, at least 51,200 years old, which the team that dated it reads as a story told in pictures. Brain scans in which a listener’s brain activity starts to track the teller’s. Why storytelling evolved is still argued over. Some 19th-century scholars’ explanations are easier to judge: they treated myths as mistaken early thinking, and ranked the world’s peoples on a ladder with Europe at the top. That ladder didn’t hold up.
How to read the labels on this page: [Documented] means the evidence shows it directly. [Strongly supported] means strong sources agree. [Plausible] means the evidence allows it but doesn’t prove it. [Disputed] means qualified experts disagree. [Unknown] means the evidence can’t answer the question.
What counts as a story?
Our working definition for this page: events in order, happening to someone who wants something, told about a time or place other than right here, right now.
That last part is the magic trick. Linguists call it displacement: talking about what isn’t in front of you. Psychologist Michael Corballis called displacement “arguably the most important driver” of language’s evolution. He argued that language lets us share our mental time travel: the remembered past, the imagined future, and events that never happened at all (Corballis 2019). [Plausible: an argued theory, not a finding]
Analogy (not evidence): a story is like sending a video to a friend who wasn’t there, except the “video” gets rebuilt inside the friend’s head from words.
Do other animals tell stories? Many animals signal to each other. Whether any other animal mentally relives the past or rehearses the future is [Disputed]. In 2009, Thomas Suddendorf, Donna Rose Addis and Corballis argued that studies of food-hiding scrub jays and of apes show “little of the flexibility and generality” of human mental time travel (Suddendorf, Addis & Corballis 2009). Corballis later changed his mind. In a 2019 paper, citing studies of rats, birds and apes, he argued its origins may reach far back in evolution. Whether animals consciously experience those inner journeys, he added, is “likely to remain a contentious issue.” What he still saw as distinctly human was the ability to share those inner journeys with others (Corballis 2019). No study used for this page describes another animal telling a story. [Unknown whether any does]
How old are stories?
Spoken stories: [Unknown]. Fossils usually counted as early members of our species go back about 300,000 years, to Jebel Irhoud, Morocco. Those brains were already modern in size, though not yet in shape (Neubauer, Hublin & Gunz 2018). [Strongly supported] Whether those people told stories is a question bones can’t answer.
Painted stories. In 2024, a team whose first author is archaeologist Adhi Agus Oktaviana of Indonesia’s National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN) and Griffith University, working with Indonesian and Australian colleagues, dated a painted panel at Leang Karampuang cave in South Sulawesi. It shows at least three human-like figures with a Sulawesi warty pig. It was painted at least 51,200 years ago (Oktaviana et al. 2024). [Documented minimum age]
In their 2024 paper, the team calls it a “narrative composition” and the earliest surviving visual storytelling then known to them. They also note that the action among the figures is “difficult to interpret.” [Plausible: the story reading is the team’s interpretation]
The same paper re-dated a hunting scene at Leang Bulu’ Sipong 4, in the same limestone region. In 2019 it had been dated to at least 43,900 years; the new method put it at least 48,000. Two lessons: these dates come from mineral crust that grew over the paint, so they’re minimums, and “firsts” keep moving.
Stories carried by voice alone. Can a folktale be older than writing? Sara Graça da Silva and Jamshid Tehrani compared 275 magic tales across 50 Indo-European-speaking populations. They used family trees of languages to estimate which tales were shared by the ancestors (da Silva & Tehrani 2016). Their strongest result: one tale about a cunning smith, “The Smith and the Devil,” traced back to Proto-Indo-European speakers with an estimated 87% probability. The authors link it to the Bronze Age and to the theory that those speakers spread from the Pontic steppe 5,000–6,000 years ago, though they grant that a Bronze Age origin is “plausible under both major models” of Indo-European origins. They also caution that a tale’s trail “is bound to be eroded over time.” [Plausible: a statistical estimate; where and when Proto-Indo-European was spoken is itself Disputed]
What happens in a brain hearing a story?
The studies below don’t point to a single “storytelling center.” In a 2010 study at Princeton, a woman told an unrehearsed, 15-minute true story about something that happened in her first year of high school while inside an MRI scanner. Eleven people later heard the recording in the scanner (Stephens, Silbert & Hasson 2010).
- The listeners’ brain activity echoed the speaker’s, usually lagging 1–3 seconds behind. The echo showed up in hearing areas, in classic language areas, and in areas linked to meaning and social understanding. [Documented for this study]
- A story told in Russian to people who didn’t speak Russian produced no significant echo. The authors interpret this as evidence that comprehension matters beyond the sound signal. This control does not isolate every difference between the two stories. [Documented result; bounded interpretation]
- Listeners with more brain areas running slightly ahead of the speaker’s understood the story best. [Documented; one speaker, 11 listeners]
Analogy (not evidence): it’s like humming along to a song a beat behind the singer. The study’s correlations do not directly show what any listener was thinking or predicting.
In a 2016 study, Alexander Huth and colleagues had seven people listen to more than two hours of The Moth Radio Hour, in which people tell stories from their own lives to a live audience. Responses tied to word meaning showed up across broad stretches of the frontal, temporal and parietal lobes, in a map “relatively symmetric” across the two hemispheres (Huth et al. 2016). [Documented for this study] Both studies are small, and both used English. What this tells us about storytelling everywhere is [Plausible], not settled.
What can a modern study tell us about the first stories?
A study of living people addresses a particular time, place and research question. It cannot directly show why storytelling first appeared. The archaeological evidence, language-family models and brain scans above also answer different questions. A minimum date for paint is not a date for spoken language. A probability calculated from a model is not a recording of an ancient tale. Correlated brain activity is not a complete explanation of what a story means to its listeners.
This page does not summarize community-specific storytelling traditions or retell community narratives. Those stories belong to the communities that tell them, and a published paper being public is not the same as permission to retell them.
How did scholars explain myths in the 1860s and 1870s?
Oxford language scholar Max Müller gave lectures at the Royal Institution of Great Britain in 1861. In the revised book version, he wrote that mythology “is in truth a disease of language” (Müller 1862, Lecture I). In his view, a name for the dawn or the bright sky slowly hardened into a god. His examples were Greek, Roman and Indian gods.
In 1871, Edward B. Tylor (1832–1917) published Primitive Culture (Tylor, vol. 1). He treated myths as evidence for the “laws” of human imagination. In his account, early thinkers saw the whole natural world as alive, and personified the sun, moon and storms. He borrowed Müller’s “disease” phrase for myths built from words, but thought myths built from real-world experience came first (chapter VIII). [Documented as Tylor’s views]
Tylor also wrote that the earliest myth-maker “arose and flourished among savage hordes” (chapter I). He built his study on a ranking of peoples: he wrote that “few would dispute” an “order of culture” running from Australian to Tahitian, Aztec, Chinese and Italian (chapter II). He also urged readers to understand other peoples’ religions, and even to respect them (chapter I). [Documented] Historian George Stocking judged that he was never a one-track evolutionist “in any stereotypical sense” (quoted by the Pitt Rivers Museum 2012).
Pushback followed. In 1896, anthropologist Franz Boas challenged the “grand system” in which every society climbs the same steps. He called such schemes “of very doubtful value” unless proven (Boas 1896, pp. 904–905). [Documented] Stocking also judged that by Tylor’s 1888 essay, a model of this ladder approach, the whole paradigm was “about to enter a period of decline” (as quoted by the Pitt Rivers Museum 2012). [Documented as Stocking’s interpretation quoted by the museum; his original books were not checked]
How we know
What exists: paint on cave walls, dated by mineral crust grown over it. Brain scans of small groups. Statistical family trees of folktales. Printed books from the 1860s and 1870s.
Whose voices are missing: the Sulawesi painters’, and every storyteller before writing. Community-specific narratives are left out here on purpose. Public access to an academic paper is not permission to retell a community’s stories.
How power shaped the record: Müller and Tylor wrote from imperial Britain. Tylor ranked the peoples whose stories he used, and he often cites missionaries’ reports about them. Today’s brain studies scanned 11 and 7 people listening in English. The Sulawesi dating was led by Indonesian and Australian researchers.
Then vs. now
Then, at least 51,200 years ago: painters in Sulawesi put figures and an animal together in one scene. What it meant to them: [Unknown].
Then, in the 1860s–1870s: leading British scholars explained myths as a “disease of language,” or as early humans’ mistaken reasoning about nature. They placed the world’s peoples on a ladder with Europe at the top.
Now: researchers investigate storytelling using several kinds of evidence. Small brain studies show listening to a story draws on networks across much of the brain, and lines up listener with speaker. Storytelling’s original purpose: [Disputed]. When it began: [Unknown].
Why this matters for a history of the mind: later chapters lean on stories: laments, healing-temple accounts, case notes, memoirs. A story is a shaped account, not a recording. We’ll read them that way.