Imaginary worlds are pervasive across forager oral tradition, undermining the claim that they are a “recent striking success.” Questions of popularity are difficult to quantify, since for most of its existence storytelling has been oral and is thus largely undocumented. Consequently, we do not know the degree to which imaginary worlds occur in storytelling overall, and lack a baseline for frequency comparisons. What is known is that (a) hunter-gatherer narrative encompasses fictional genres “typically containing some background elements that do not exist in the real world,” and (b) these fictions encode factual information (Scalise Sugiyama, Reference Scalise Sugiyama2021b, Reference Scalise Sugiyama2021c).

Forager societies distinguish between tales of the recent and distant past (Scalise Sugiyama, Reference Scalise Sugiyama and Hogan2017a). The former are oral histories, while the latter are set in the Distant Time, a mythical era when things occurred that are impossible today, such as shape-shifting and talking animals (Scalise Sugiyama, Reference Scalise Sugiyama and Hogan2017a, Reference Scalise Sugiyama, Vanderbeke and Cooke2019). This era ended as, in the course of their adventures, Distant Time beings magically transformed the world into its present state. Thus, Distant Time genres meet the authors' definition of imaginary worlds as places that “the recipients of the fiction could not have possibly explored in real life, be it … locations in the future or the distant past” (target article, sect. 2, para. 2). Significantly, Distant Time stories presage all the speculative fiction genres listed in Table 1 of the target article except uchronia.

The fantasy genre is evinced in stories about dragons (Wilbert & Simoneau, Reference Wilbert and Simoneau1983, p. 137), mountains that grow (Opler, Reference Opler1938, p. 52), and a monster (Sniniq) that shoots light beams from its eyes to stun its victims (McIlwraith, Reference McIlwraith1948). In its anticipation of laser technology, the Sniniq tale also exemplifies science fiction. Another case is seen when, to escape two homicidal running rocks, the Jicarilla hero Killer-of-Enemies “began to use the speed of light which the sun had promised him. The sun would throw a beam of light ahead and he would travel with it to that place” (Opler, Reference Opler1938, p. 71).

The Killer-of-Enemies epic also exemplifies adventure fiction. Ubiquitous in forager narrative (Boas, Reference Boas and Teit1898; Jobling, Reference Jobling2001), the hero genre typically involves journeys to unfamiliar lands and encounters with supernatural phenomena (e.g., Attla, Jones, & Thompson, Reference Attla, Jones and Thompson1990; Oman, Reference Oman1995). Descriptions of these places provide verbal maps (Basso, Reference Basso1996). For example, a hot spring inhabited by a kicking monster is sketched as follows: the “water was boiling and seething all around that place. He lay on top of a ledge beside a mountain road that wound along above the hot springs. As people passed by he kicked them into the water. [where] his four daughters lived. And all those whom he kicked in the water, these girls ate” (Opler, Reference Opler1938, p. 66). Although not supplied through paratexts, such topographic sketches belie the authors' claim that Treasure Island features “one of the first imaginary maps” (target article, sect. 6.2, para. 2). In Killer-of-Enemies' use of supernatural abilities to combat evil we also see the superhero genre. The Yąnomamö child hero Õeõemë is another case: “transformed into a supernatural being” (Wilbert & Simoneau, Reference Wilbert and Simoneau1990, p. 105) after being stung by ants, his powers enable him to decimate an enemy village armed only with a few arrow points.

Utopian and dystopian worlds are manifest in origin stories. Quinault tradition relates that Eagle wanted rivers to run in both directions, but Raven objected because “that would be too easy for the people” (Clark, Reference Clark1953, p. 87). Similarly, Coyote is widely regarded as a fool whose “blundering accounts for many things in the world, especially evil” (Steward, Reference Steward1936, p. 358). While the Creator is “always striving to make life easy for man,” Coyote is constantly “striving to render life hard, and insisting that man must die and suffer” (Dixon, Reference Dixon1905, p. 336). Natural disaster myths describe apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic worlds (Ludwin et al., Reference Ludwin, Dennis, Carver, McMillan, Losey, Clague and James2005). As a Crater Lake origin story reports: “mountains shook and crumbled. Red-hot rocks as large as the hills hurtled through the skies. Burning ashes fell like rain. The Chief of the Below World spewed fire from his mouth. Like an ocean of flame it devoured the forests on the mountains and in the valleys” (Barber & Barber, Reference Barber and Barber2004, p. 6). A Toba conflagration myth begins “One day the world came to an end” because “the fire and the sulphur burned everything” until “there was nothing left in the world” (Wilbert & Simoneau, Reference Wilbert and Simoneau1989, p. 83).

Forager narrative abounds with “fiction[s] in which the consumer will learn a lot of novel information” about the story world. For example, Dreamtime myths focus on the “naming of places and the movements of ancestral beings from one spot to the next. [M]any tell of journeys covering hundreds of miles of desert, through areas that Mardudjara in many cases have not seen … [and] give them a strong feeling that they know those areas” (Tonkinson, Reference Tonkinson1978, p. 89). However, as this observation indicates, imaginary worlds are not as fictional as they seem: origins are attributed to supernatural beings, but descriptions accurately map local geography (Scalise Sugiyama, Reference Scalise Sugiyama, Vanderbeke and Cooke2019).

Fictional worlds also accurately map social environments. For example, although set in a world of counterfactual beings, The Lord of the Rings is based heavily on Anglo Saxon and Norse myth, and references the actual geography, economies, and politics of medieval and proto-industrial Northern Europe. In so doing, it provides useful comparisons of real-world economic and governance systems: The peaceful yeoman farmers of the Shire, steppe horsemen of Rohan, and woodland artisans of Rivendell are contrasted with the totalitarian industrial wasteland of Isengard. Thus, contrary to the authors' claim that they are “primarily designed for entertainment” (target article, sect. 3, para. 2) fictions are cultural inventions that illustrate possible consequences of diverse courses of action (Scalise Sugiyama, Reference Scalise Sugiyama, Gottshall and Wilson2005, Reference Scalise Sugiyama2021b). This may provide adaptations with information inputs that scaffold their development (Tooby & Cosmides, Reference Tooby and Cosmides2001). For example, story worlds may furnish episodic memory with vicarious experiences that can be recruited for the generation of plans (Scalise Sugiyama, Reference Scalise Sugiyama, Weekes-Shackelford and Shackelford2017b, Reference Scalise Sugiyama2017c).

In short, the content of fictional worlds is largely factual (Scalise Sugiyama, Reference Scalise Sugiyama2021a). Unless otherwise stipulated, pretend events are expected to unfold as they do in real life (Onishi, Baillargeon, & Leslie, Reference Onishi, Baillargeon and Leslie2007). For example, if a person pretends to pour water into a cup, we expect them to hold the cup beneath, not above, the pitcher, because in real life water flows downward. Similarly, we attribute normal rather than supernatural agency to the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park: we expect predators to attack using their teeth and claws and not by shooting laser beams from their eyes, because the latter is pretense and has not been stipulated.

This view challenges the authors' claim that there is not “any specific value in the information included” (target article, sect. 3, para. 3) in imaginary worlds. So too does the cross-cultural use of narrative devices that distinguish pretense from fact. For example, etiological animal tales – which explain how a species acquired one or more of its distinctive traits – use evidential forms, formulaic phrases, and motifs that mark them as Distant Time stories. Some devices (e.g., “they say,” “long ago”) encode the information that animals in the story world possess certain human traits which they lack today, while others (e.g., the transformation motif, “that is why”) identify their real-world traits. In so doing, they provide information about local fauna that is far from being “totally useless in real life” (target article, sect. 3, para. 3).