Building Nests, Crafting Stories: The Hidden Skills That Connect Us

If you had to spend the night sleeping on a branch, how would you do it? How would you make yourself comfortable? How would you make sure you got a good night sleep? How would you keep warm? Avoid falling, or being eaten alive by mosquitoes or snakes? Believe it or not our closest relatives the great apes have mastered all of these challenges by constructing nests in the treetops, but do you know how they are different to birds’ nests? In this talk, we will answer all of these questions by learning about the fascinating world of orangutan nest building behaviour. You can also learn how to build your own nest using engineering know-how. Orangutans are master nest-builders and use knowledge learnt from their mother's and other role models with plenty of practise to produce stable, safe arboreal nests suitable for different purposes at different times. This ability to build nests has had a huge impact on the evolution of intelligence and persists to this day in the way humans make use of beds for restful sleep.

To tell stories is to be human – whether we are chatting over a pint with friends or talking about our skills at a job interview. Stories can help us build connections, transmit social norms, and present ourselves to the world. In this session, we will look at storytelling from the perspective of sociolinguistics, which is the study of how we use language in everyday life. We will look at how storytelling has been researched and what useful insights we can take away from this to become better storytellers.