Creatures of Story and Song | Reaktion Books

Food, foragers, and folklore: the role of narrative in human subsistence

Narrative is a species-typical, reliably developing, complex cognitive process whose design is unlikely to have emerged by chance. Moreover, the folklore record indicates that narrative content is consistent across widely divergent cultures. I have argued elsewhere that a storyteller may use narrative to manipulate an audience's representations of the social and/or physical environment to serve his or her own fitness ends. However, my subsequent research suggests that such manipulation results from a broader selection pressure which narrative effectively alleviates: information acquisition. By substituting verbal representations for potentially costly first-hand experience, narrative enables an individual to safely and efficiently acquire information pertinent to the pursuit of fitness in local habitats. If this hypothesis is true, narrative should be rich with information useful to the pursuit of fitness. One class of information integral to the accomplishment of this task is foraging knowledge. In this paper, then, I present evidence that foraging peoples use narrative to transmit subsistence information: specifically, I demonstrate how various narrative devices (e.g., setting, description, mimicry, anthropomorphism) are used to communicate foraging knowledge.

Why we should tune into the orchestra of the animal world | Aeon Essays

Listen to the boundless sounds of nature, the great animal orchestra, whose songs imbue the world with fresh meaning

Whale Hunting

Discovering the hidden stories of how the world really works — by Project Brazen.

The Beaver’s Food Foraging / Tree-Cutting Behavior - AnimAnswers.com

Beavers are one of the largest rodents in the world. These fantastic creatures have thick fur, webbed feet, and flattened tails that are useful when they forage. They are also known for their notable dam-building abilities and unique skills in making their homes. Their sharp teeth help them to cut different sizes of trees.  Let’s ... Read more

Sinker sound

Fish in the strange domain of the mermaid, and find many strange fish with their own unique original music! You must REEL to the beat of the song! This is a fishing game with a musical rhythm gimmick!

Introduction · Crafting Interpreters

Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.

How To Speak Whale | Book | Tom Mustill

How to Speak Whale is an unforgettable look at how close we truly are to communicating with another species – and how doing so might change our world. Discover more.

Otoboke Beaver embrace the nonsense on “Yakitori”

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Kircher's Dragons

" There is a great deal of debate among writers with regards to dragons: do animals of this sort actually exist in nature, or, as...

Shaggy dog story

In its original sense, a shaggy-dog story or yarn is an extremely long-winded anecdote characterized by extensive narration of typically irrelevant incidents and terminated by an anticlimax. In other words, it is a long story that is intended to be amusing and that has an intentionally silly or meaningless ending.[1]

V

The wild, macabre tale of the twentieth century and of …