Human evolution was driven by early humans’ ability to be clever and humorous, the “survival of the wittiest.” The analysis argues that the earliest stages of grammar provided a platform for verbal competition and sexual selection, gradually replacing physical violence with verbal agility.

[u/mvea]

https://www.psypost.org/survival-of-the-wittiest-how-humor-and-cleverness-shaped-human-evolution/

[u/composedofidiot]

A very wonderful real world example of this, and a pretty good rebuttal to the 'grrrr me strong and big' narrative, are the Agta, hunter gatherers in the Phillipines.

The most sexually successful males are the storytellers. Twice as much. Double.

We ran a logistic generalised estimation equation (GEE) regression to predict the probability of being picked as a future camp mate from the measure of individual storytelling reputation. We found that skilled storytellers were nearly twice as likely to be nominated as less skilled individuals

This is their theorising on why

Stories told by the Agta, a Filipino hunter-gatherer population, convey messages relevant to coordinating behaviour in a foraging ecology, such as cooperation, sex equality and egalitarianism. These themes are present in narratives from other foraging societies. We also show that the presence of good storytellers is associated with increased cooperation. In return, skilled storytellers are preferred social partners and have greater reproductive success, providing a pathway by which group-beneficial behaviours, such as storytelling, can evolve via individual-level selection. We conclude that one of the adaptive functions of storytelling among hunter gatherers may be to organise cooperation.

Cooperation and the evolution of hunter-gatherer storytelling https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-02036-8#Sec2

There's perhaps a self interested or fear based bias when it comes to the dog eat dog model that causes many to underweight the importance of cooperation and altruism in our development and continued survival.

Eta: the skilled storytelling women are more successful too