It is important to remember that foraging peoples still exist to this very day, and many explorers, missionaries, and - in the last 125 years or so - anthropologists, linguists, and folklorists,, have had extensive contact with hunter-gatherer cultures.

These peoples offer compelling evidence on the nature of pre-agricultural narrative storytelling, because they are pre-agricultural narrative storytellers.

Now, an important note - extant hunter-gatherers are not "primitive." Not at all. In fact, they are simply so successful that they never had to change and adapt to survive like the rest of us.

So, what do these groups tell us about the nature of pre-agricultral storytelling?

Well, first of all, that it is a hugely important part of social life. Roughly 80% of nighttime conversation among the San is devoted to storytelling.

Second, they and other groups teach us storytelling is of fundamental importance to our success. As you are probably aware, humans are not very physically capable. We are weak, slow, and have meager senses of smell and hearing. We do have amazing manual dexterity and endurance, but the point is, to be successful in this world, we have to rely on intelligence, via a combination of experience and improvised problem-solving, and the former informs the latter.

Now, as we all know, nothing trumps experience. Nobody wants their knee-replacement or tattoo done by the new guy. And storytelling is so important because it allows us to share visceral experiental information in a way that simple teaching does not, by transferring feeling, atmosphere, and cicrumstance.

Every extant hunter-gatherer culture shares this trait. 100%, no exceptions. It is fundamental to the human experience, and sll evidence points to it being as old as complex language and symbolic thought.

With storytelling being as old as,behavioral modernity - perhaps as old as anatomical modernity - it is natural to wonder, as you do here, if elements of stories reach deep into prehistory, and if some basic facts have survived hundreds - even a thousand - generations.

Yes, they have. First, in abstraction: culture is predicated upon myth, by means of tradition. So, in that sense, the sociocultural underpinnings of modernity are the prehistoric narratives of the Paleolithic, and those stories survive in every symbolic expression we produce.

More concretely, there is a wealth of evidence of the great age of oral traditions of aborignal groups like the Tjapwurung of Australia, who have accurate stories of natural events from as much as 10,000 years ago, or the Kiamath, who have passed down the story of the creation of Crater Lake in Oregon for over 7,000 years.

I can expand with more examples, if you like.

The short answer is that yes, essentially every culture has stories about the arrival of agriculture but, no, we should not default to taking these as authentic historical witnesses to the arrival of agriculture or life before.

For most readers of this post, the most familiar story of the arrival of agriculture and life beforehand is not one that you will likely think of as a story of the arrival of agriculture and life beforehand: the Jewish-cum-Christian story of the Garden of Eden and Adam & Eve.

You mostly know about snakes and forbidden fruit, but what were their punishments? Well, they lost the ability to eat from the Tree of Life because they had eaten from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, so they lost immortality, they were banned from the Garden of Eden and exiled "East of Eden" to the "Land of Nod". But they also got specific curses—the snake is cursed to crawl on the ground. To punish Eve, God says he will "increase you pangs in childbearing;/in pain you shall bring forth children." And what's Adam's punishment? Essentially, the labor of farming. Also, mortality. Here's Genesis 3:17-19:

17 And to the man[b] he said,

“Because you have listened to the voice of your wife,
and have eaten of the tree
about which I commanded you,
‘You shall not eat of it,’
cursed is the ground because of you;
in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life;
18 thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you;
and you shall eat the plants of the field.
19 By the sweat of your face
you shall eat bread
until you return to the ground,
for out of it you were taken;
you are dust,
and to dust you shall return.”

This type of story is called an "etiology", or in plainer language an origin story. Mythology, religion, folklore, how ever you want to divide it up, all are rife with these "how the cheetah got its spots"-type things.

If you are reading this, you've probably been immersed in a written culture your whole life. We're used to thinking of religion as textual, a Holy Writ, the Holy Word that's meant to be followed wholly. In oral cultures and partially literate cultures (like ancient Mesopotamia), how seriously stories/myths/folklore are meant to be taken varies greatly. In Mesopotamia, for instance, there are several different contradictory etiologies for the advent of agriculture. Sometimes, these stories are meant to record authentic history (essentially all historians of the Biblical Israel accept that the Second Temple built after the Babylonian exile was during the reigns of early Achaemenid Persian kings). Sometimes, these stories are meant to record authentic history but some modern historians doubt them (the First Temple was purportedly built by King Solomon but some—probably a minority—of historians and archeologists doubt that King Solomon existed at all). Sometimes, they're meant to merely to entertain (how the cheetah got its spots, or many Anansi stories that my grandmother had on tape and played for me). Sometimes, they're meant to just provide an answer for why something exists (there are pillars of salt in the Judean Desert near the Dead Sea, but how seriously are we supposed to connect them with the story of Lot's Wife?). Sometimes, they're meant to convey a moral or a cultural pattern of thinking (in societies where nutrition is based on grains like wheat or rice, the etiology of humanity generally involves some mythical creature/god crafting man from dirt; in societies based on tubers like potatoes, sweet potatoes, cassava, it's more common for some mythical creature/god to be cut up; in pastoralist societies, if I remember correctly, it's most common for some mythical creature/god to be slaughtered). Sometimes, they're probably just someone's best guesses. It's hard to generalize across cultures.

However, in this particular case about the arrival of agriculture and beforehand, one thing that absolutely must be kept in mind is that, for most of the world, the distance between the widespread adoption of agriculture and the adoption of writing (which would record these stories for us to look at it) is thousands of years. In the Fertile Crescent, the first permanent settled agriculture is probably around let's say 8,000 BCE. It came out of the foothills and into Mesopotamia proper a bit later as higher population densities allowed hydraulic control of the great rivers, let's say something like 5500 and 4000 BCE. We don't get any writing until around 3500 BCE and we don't get real literary texts until 3000-2500 BCE, depending on what you want to call a literary text. The historical Gilgamesh (who probably never existed) is supposed to have lived in the Third Dynasty of Ur. The oldest surviving Gilgamesh text we have is ~1800 BCE. At its most generous, that's still about 2,000 years removed from the advent of agriculture in the region. This isn't unique to Mesopotamia. It's similar in China, it's similar in Central Mexico, it's longer in New Guinea and Northern South America (which both lacked written languages before colonization). Which is to say, all the places where agriculture definitely developed independently (and to which we can add other places like Continental North America and Sub-Saharan Africa as potential sites of independent development of agriculture), there is a long time between the development of agriculture and the recording of etiologies about agriculture.

Think, for a moment, about Medieval European stained-glass images of Biblical scenes. Almost all show the people from 1st century Jerusalem wearing 10th century European garb. These tell us a lot about what was being worn around when the art was being made. They tell us much less about what sort of dress was popular in the time period they're purporting to depict. I think we should generally take the etiological stories the same way—they tell us something about the time they're written in more than the time they're writing about. Oral history and oral poetry—particularly when it's conveying formulaic things like lineages or certain turns of phrase—can preserve things accurately probably for several generations, let's say hundreds of years. I think you're much harder pressed to find anything preserving detailed information for thousands of years.

This isn't to say that these societies were completely ignorant of unsettled, non-farming groups that existed at the same time and roughly the same place. As many have argued (most recently and famously James C. Scott in The Art of Not Being Governed), there's always been a dialogue between mostly settled state societies in rich farm land (often in valleys) and non-state societies which are often in marginal farmland (mountains, deserts, swamps/marshes), who may or may not be settled and may or may not perform agriculture. I never have found a satisfactory date for the "end" of hunting and gathering in the Fertile Crescent, but judging by the texts we have, by the time we have writing, the many non-agriculture group is Fertile Crescent is nomadic herders. This is Cain and Abel (Cain is farmer; Abel the herdsman—the Hebrew Bible is unabashedly pro-pastoralist). At one point, the nomadic pastoralist Guti people who lived in the foothills around Mesopotamia seemed to disrupt Mesopotamian Civilization entirely. We late have Semitic peoples from the Levent, possibly nomads, taking over Egypt (the Hyksos/15th dynasty). We have many examples of horse nomads pouring out of the Eurasian Steppe and haranguing or even conquering settled states in China, the Middle East, and Europe (the Scythians, the Huns, the Mongols, the Turks, the Avars, etc). However, as far as I can think, this obviously alternative settled agriculture never seems to be presented as our original state. Scott in fact argues the opposite—in Southeast Asia, where he primarily looks, the Upland non-state groups are more likely to argue that we were once like the Lowland state groups but that we lost/forgot the trappings of civilizations (writing, etc). That doesn't really have to do with your question, but I always found it quite interesting—settled agriculture's main competitor is never really treated in their mythology as a "before" state, as far as I can think of.

But, in short, primarily we should take these stories as myth, as literature, rather than accurate portraits of a prelapsarian history. These agricultural origin stories tell us more about the cultures of when they were written than the cultures of when they were writing about.