This paper presents a pilot study in the "epidemiological" program for cultural research put forward by Dan Sperber. Theory is offered to argue that verse form is so disabling that its worldwide distribution must be explained by functions other than the broad communicative, or ideological, power traditionally attributed to it. The theoretical case is confirmed by numerical data showing that in matched texts of English prose and verse the latter contain words of a lower mean length (measured in syllables). Candidate (...) hypotheses for the epidemiology of verse are offered, including design for mnemonic properties, the registration of differences in verbal intelligence, the presentation of gestures of commitment, and the introduction of levels of quasi-randomness that lead to an impression of semantic richness and the illusion of profound and powerful communication. (shrink)

Teaching is hypothesized to be a species-typical behavior in humans that contributed to the emergence of cumulative culture. Several within-culture studies indicate that foragers depend heavily on social learning to acquire practical skills and knowledge, but it is unknown whether teaching is universal across forager populations. Teaching can be defined ethologically as the modification of behavior by an expert in the presence of a novice, such that the expert incurs a cost and the novice acquires skills/knowledge more efficiently or that (...) it would not acquire otherwise. One behavioral modification hypothesized to be an adaptation for teaching is ostensive communication—exaggerations of prosody and gesture that signal intent to transmit generalizable knowledge and indicate the intended receiver. On this view, the use of ostensive communication in conjunction with the transmission of generalizable knowledge constitutes evidence of teaching. Oral storytelling appears to meet these criteria: Indigenous peoples regard their traditions as important sources of ecological and social knowledge, and oral storytelling is widely reported to employ paralinguistic communication. To test this hypothesis, descriptions of performed narrative in forager societies were coded for the use of 14 ostensive-communicative behaviors and the presence of generalizable knowledge. Although biased toward North America, the study sample comprised 53 forager cultures spanning five continents, 34 language families, and diverse biomes. All cultures evinced the predicted behaviors. Results suggest that foragers use storytelling as a mode of instruction, thus providing cross-cultural evidence of teaching in forager populations. (shrink)