[cwmoore]

"First be a human" is objectively hard. Stories "appear designed to coordinate social behaviour and promote cooperation" from your link, as a functional component of groups of people. Scientific laws, and other random factoids abstracted from character plotlines typically do not "arise spontaneously in children".

The frequent retellings of familiar stories with new characters and plot twists suggests to me that there might not be as much learning involved in stories as pattern recognition. I have no citations to back that up but would be delighted to read a story that critiques the accepted story story.

[watwut]

Why would frequent reteling sugest there is not much learning?

[cwmoore]

Because so many of the stories are already familiar.