Storytelling began as a way for humans to relay information, from where to find food sources to the benefits of familial bonding. Raymond A. Mar, Ph.D. theorizes that fictional stories were the easiest way to memorize and communicate a complex set of information.

Stories are hardwired into us as humans. For thousands of years, they’ve been our primary way of understanding the world. The first recorded stories were painted on cave walls 36,000 years ago, and some of those early tales—like the volcanic eruption depicted in ancient France—still endure today. That’s the power of storytelling.

Our ancestors, on the other hand, communicated through language and gesture, song and dance. They led rich interior lives, creating ideas, images, and wholly imagined realities that shaped their interior worlds just as deftly as their tools made clothes to keep them warm and huts to shelter them.