Night School
From Embers of Society, by Polly Wiessner. I quote from it at length as background for my thinking about consciousness and teaching and education. The article is a free PDF at the link above, if you'd like to see the lovely maps, tables, and diagrams as well as a nice Discussion section. Boldface emphases are mine. My only comment would be that this reinforces my picture of 'teaching' as evolving from a mostly adult audience to gradually include children (and to thus be modified, gradually, to its newer audience):
Control of fire had an enormous impact on the life of our hominin ancestors. As Wrangham and Carmody have so cogently argued (all free-access PDF articles or books: 1, 2, 3), the use of fire for cooking greatly increased the digestibility of food and effective provisioning of young, allowing for shorter birth intervals. Fire altered anatomy, particularly brain size and gut volume, and radically reduced chewing time. Fire protected early humans from predators and provided a new context for social interaction when food was brought to a central site for cooking. Modified landscapes after burning and higher caloric returns from cooked foods lowered the costs of foraged foods, and thus the costs of sharing. Finally, artificial firelight altered circadian rhythms and extended the day, freeing time for social interaction that did not conflict with time for subsistence work.
Current archaeological evidence indicates that our ancestors had sporadic control of fire by 1 million y ago or longer and regular use after approximately 400,000 ka. With or following the control of fire, many developments were unfolding that rendered modern humans "unique": extended cooperative breeding, higher orders of theory of mind, religion, language, social learning and cultural transmission, cultural institutions and their regulation, and intergroup cooperation and exchange. Although much work been has done on the effects of cooking on diet and anatomy, little is known about how important the extended day was for igniting the embers of culture and society . . . .
When firelight extended the day, did it simply give more time or did it create a qualitatively different time and space? . . . By day people devoted 31% of their talk to economic discussions: foraging plans, resource availability, hunting strategies, and technology. Another 34% of time was occupied by complaint or criticisms that sometimes regulated norms, and other times were unfounded. Jealousy is the keeper of equality in many egalitarian societies and criticism was motivated by envy approximately one-third of the time. Verbal criticism, complaint, and conflict were the spice of . . . life that made group living viable; if not worked out by talk, people voted with their feet and departed. Two cases in the sample escalated to the point of brandishing poison arrows but the aggressors were physically restrained. Close to 95% of [these] cases were between the parties directly affected by certain behavior, not third parties, as is more common in larger-scale societies. The one exception was the leveling of "big shots," everybody’s sport. Another 16% of daytime conversations were joking sessions, often between individuals in the same sex or age cohort (e.g., raucous sexual joking, adventures of youths). Four percent of conversations centered on interethnic relations; of course people from other ethnic groups were briefly mentioned in many other conversations. When people rested in the shade, occasionally stories were told with background music from thumb pianos, pluriarcs, and musical bows.
After dinner and dark, the harsher mood of the day mellowed and people who were in the mood gathered around single fires to talk, make music, or dance. Some nights large groups convened and other nights smaller groups. The focus of conversation changed radically as economic concerns and social gripes were put aside. At this time 81% of lengthy conversations involving many people were devoted to stories; these stories were largely about known people and amusing, exciting, or endearing escapades. Storytellers did not praise heroes or moralize; advancing oneself in the moral hierarchy or demoting others was avoided, as was any form of self-promotion. No doubt, listeners gleaned unspoken lessons from stories. When a story was over, others rehashed details, embellished, and discussed. The language of stories tended to be rhythmic, complex, and symbolic, with individuals repeating the last words of phrases or adding an affirmative "Eh he." Frequently listeners were stunned with suspense, nearly in tears, or rolling with laughter; they arrived on a similar emotional wavelength as moods were altered.
Stories contained little environmental information, although they almost always described what people were eating at the time of the event. Stories expanded the virtual social universe by reawakening feelings for those in far-away places or relating the details of healers’ journeys in trance. Minor daytime disputes waned as talk progressed. As the fire faded to coals, people returned to their respective hearths to settle in for the night as sleepiness set in. Hours later, around 2:00 AM (the "little day"), some adults awoke, smoked, stoked the fire to deter predators, and chatted for a short time.
Both men and women told stories, particularly older people who had mastered the art. Camp leaders were frequently good storytellers, although not exclusively so. Two of the best storytellers in the 1970s were blind but cherished for their humor and verbal skills. Stories provided a win-win situation: those who thoroughly engaged others were likely to gain recognition as their stories traveled. Those who listened were entertained while collecting the experiences of others with no direct cost. Because story telling is so important for remembering and knowing people beyond the camp, there is likely to have been strong social selection for the manipulation of language to convey characters and emotions.
Night conversations covered the same institutional terrain as day conversations but with a very different tone . . . For example, whereas day conversations dwelt on current marital disputes, night talk ventured to amusing stories of marriages past. Whereas day conversations centered on the diversion of a specific gift in xaro exchange [search hxaro], night conversations related adventures about long-distance journeys for xaro in the past . . .
Firelit conversations about known people and their exploits often captured the workings of entire institutions in a smallscale society with little formal teaching. Through stories and subsequent discussion, people collected experiences of others and accumulated knowledge of options that others had tried. The nitty-gritty of egalitarianism, food sharing, kinship dues, and land tenure were thus regulated by day; night talk was critical for transmitting the big picture of the workings of marriage, kinship, xaro exchange, and cosmology/trance healing.
