A spaceship entered Earth's orbit and broadcast a message:
"We are the Interstellar Library. Do you want to swap? We have thousands of stories."
There were many replies.
The library was silent for a whole day, then:
"What do you mean, 'We have millions'?"
"Ah, sorry, I think I misspoke; we have millions in just one of our more widely known languages. Take everything together and I wouldn't be surprised if we have billions."
True story:
Around the time I was in college, as a human being who couldn't walk, who was also friends with humans who couldn't see, and friends who couldn't hear, I was getting sick and tired of all the pop science shows on TV that kept linking our evolution into human beings to our ability to walk upright, our ability to distinguish ripe fruit from unripe fruit using our color vision, and our ability to speak and learn language by hearing it.
So I decided to look around and watch all the animals I saw around campus -- humans included -- and just watch what they did. Granted, most of the nonhuman animals large enough for me to watch casually around campus were birds. But I also thought back to all the other animals I'd seen doing things.
And I realized that humans were the only animal I could think of, and remember ever having observed. who engaged in one very strange (truly bizarre, if you think about it) behavior:
We're the only animal to gather in large groups, Fall Into a Trance-like State, and Focus All of Our Conscious Mental Energy on One or A Few Community Members, Who Do All of the Talking.
Sometimes, this trance-like state is so deep, we lose awareness of our immediate surroundings. Sometimes, for hours at a time.
In other words, humans are the only animal* that engages in The Storytelling Ritual.
And moreover, the roles of Storyteller and Story Audience are not fixed to any caste or life stage (like the different roles in an ant colony or beehive), but can, and do, frequently switch.
Human children, even before their old enough to form complex sentences, start telling simple stories. And the grownups worth their salt encourage them.
Storytelling is our uniquely honed, highly evolved, most universal, human trait.
Storytelling for hours where you lose your sense of time and self is really unique to humans as we know.
Something that is similar to me is bees dancing to communicate to the rest of the hive.
*nod, nod*
I think of it as the audience surrendering their consciousness to the storyteller for safekeeping, for a set period of time (which is why we feel so betrayed when the story cheats its ending *cough*Game of Thrones*cough*). It's like handing your wallet over to someone for safekeeping. If the storyteller's good, you'll find extra bills inside, when they hand it back to you. :-)
Bees, and prairie dogs, chickens, and certain monkeys, all use language to share information. Humans use language to share imagination -- not only what is, but what could be (either as an aspiration or a warning). And what makes each language unique and beautiful (and so much more complex, as far as we can tell, from other animals' languages) -- its idioms, rhymes, rhythms, and metaphors -- are all tools the storyteller uses to hold the audience's attention, and make a story more memorable and sharable.
No individual human can survive without a community. Stories, both fact and fiction, are the strongest glue for keeping that community together.
Also, if you want an excellent story of aliens trying to understand humans and their stories, you really should watch the movie Galaxy Quest.
