Nobody knows when fiction began. Maybe the first story-teller was a prehistoric mother trying to explain the world to her children. Or perhaps it was a hunter telling about his adventures around the camp fire. Who can tell? What we do know, though, is that story-telling was a purely oral activity until around 800 BC. Myths and tales were passed down by word of mouth and had to be memorized by each new generation of story-tellers. This oral tradition only changed when ancient peoples started to keep written records of certain stories. The earliest surviving examples of these are the epics of Homer, a blind professional story-teller, who lived in the eighth century BC.