At first, Migliano wasn’t actually interested in storytelling. She wanted to know what qualities the Agta most value in their peers, given that they are nomadic and their camps continuously shift. So, her students asked 300 Agta to name the five people they’d most want to live with. They also asked the volunteers to nominate the strongest people they knew; the best hunters, fishers, and foragers; the ones whose opinions are most respected; and the ones with most medical knowledge. And finally, almost as an afterthought, they asked the volunteers to name the best storytellers. That, they assumed, was something relatively unimportant, and would make for an interesting contrast against the other more esteemed skills.

In fact, the Agta seemed to value storytelling above all else. Good storytellers were twice as likely to be named as ideal living companions as more pedestrian tale spinners, and storytelling acumen mattered far more all the other skills. “It was highly valued, twice as much as being a good hunter,” says Migliano. “We were puzzled.”

Fortunately, she had been working with Agta Aid, a nonprofit organization that had been trying to preserve the Agta’s oral stories in written forms. “We asked them if we could have a look at the stories they were collecting, and we realized that most of the content was about cooperation, egalitarianism, and gender equality.” The male sun and female moon divvy up the sky. A pig helps its injured friend—a sea cow—into the ocean so they can race side by side. A winged ant learns that she is not above her other wingless sisters.

These themes aren’t unique to the Agta. They’re also present in around 70 percent of the stories that Migliano compiled from work with other hunter-gatherer groups. “Hunter-gatherers move around a lot and no one has particular power,” she explains. “You need ways of ensuring cooperation in an egalitarian society, and we realized that you could use stories to broadcast the norms that are important to them.” People can use religion to achieve a similar end, enforcing good behavior through fear of a punitive deity. But Migliano points to research suggesting that high gods are a relatively recent invention, which emerged once human societies became large. Small communities like the Agta don’t have them. Instead, they use stories for the same purpose.

Migliano’s team asked Agta volunteers from various camps to play a simple game, in which they could share rice with their camp-mates. And they found that such sharing was more likely in camps with a higher proportion of good storytellers.

That’s just a correlation, though. It’s possible that the storytellers were actively fostering more generosity among their peers. Alternatively, Migliano says, “if you live in a more cooperative camp, perhaps you have more time and you just tell more fun stories.” But if that’s true, she adds, it wouldn’t explain why so many of the actual stories feature leitmotifs of cooperation, rather than other happy and positive themes. And it certainly doesn’t explain why storytelling skill is so beneficial for those who wield it.