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CHAPTER 4
Stories of lemurs and robots
The social origin of story-telling
Kerstin Dautenhahn
University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield
Introduction
This chapter
1
discusses narrative intelligence in the context of the origins of
primate (social) intelligence. The relationship between social intelligence and
narrative intelligence is outlined, with a particular emphasis on 1) the phyloge-
netic origins of primate (narrative) intelligence, and 2) the ontogenetic origin
of autobiographical stories. The chapter is based on the assumption that in or-
der to fully understand the importance and role of narrative in human intelli-
gence one needs to draw attention to 'where stories come from', i.e. addressing
whether story-telling can be linked to communication mechanisms that are
evolutionary older but served a similar function, under which conditions and
constraints story-telling capacities might have evolved, to what extent narra-
tive intelligence is linked to social intelligence, etc, see Read and Miller (1995).
This chapter will address some of these questions on the
origin of narrative
in
primates
and hopes to complement research that focuses on the particular
structure and role of narrative in
humans
, e.g. (Turner 1996). Since the on-
togenetic (developmental) aspects of story-telling are discussed in more detail
elsewhere, e.g. in (Engel 1995/1999; Nelson 1986), this chapter focuses on se-
lected research in primatology and autobiographical memory. The
Narrative
Intelligence Hypothesis
(NIH) is explained, according to which the evolutionary
origin of stories and narrativity was correlated with increasing social dynam-
ics in primate societies, in particular the need to communicate about third-
party relationships. Human narrative intelligence might have evolved because
the structure of narrative is particularly suited to communicate about the social
world, although in present human societies narrative and social-telling is used
