Tag: myth

Proto-Uralic Homeland (VI): Mythology & Metallurgy

bronze-smelting
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This post is part of a draft on palaeolinguistics and the Proto-Uralic homeland. See below for the color code of protoforms.

10. Metallurgy

PU (Saa., Fi., Md., Ma., P, Ms.?, Kh., Smy.?) *wäśkä (*waśki?) ‘copper; ore, brass’ (UEW Nº 1123; Kallio 2006: 6). Irregular cognates suggest it might have been borrowed during the split-up of Proto-Uralic (cf. Aikio 2015: 42). However, compare potentially regular cognates from *wäskä in PFi. *vaski ‘ore, copper, bronze; brass’ (Kallio 2012: 167; Zhivlov 2014: 115), PSaa. *weśkä ‘copper; brass’, Md. Kazhlodka viśkä ‘chain’ (Häkkinen 2012: 18), and possibly Hu. … Read the rest “Proto-Uralic Homeland (VI): Mythology & Metallurgy”

Storytelling was a source for cooperation in hunter-gatherer societies before religion

A new article, Cooperation and the evolution of hunter-gatherer storytelling, by Smith et al., Nature Communications (2017).

Storytelling is a human universal. From gathering around the camp-fire telling tales of ancestors to watching the latest television box-set, humans are inveterate producers and consumers of stories. Despite its ubiquity, little attention has been given to understanding the function and evolution of storytelling. Here we explore the impact of storytelling on hunter-gatherer cooperative behaviour and the individual-level fitness benefits to being a skilled storyteller. Stories told by the Agta, a Filipino hunter-gatherer population, convey messages relevant to coordinating behaviour in a

… Read the rest “Storytelling was a source for cooperation in hunter-gatherer societies before religion”