The term literature excludes orally transmitted forms of verbal art. Members of traditional cultures often have remarkable oral poetry, creation myths, other cosmologies, legends, stories, incantations, poems and the like, some of which have been studied  by anthropologists and linguists. Texts of these kinds commonly directly appeal to members of other societies as well: metaphors used (a typical mark of Homo symbolicus), various forms of rhymes and other structuring devices and, particularly, psychological contents are not, as one could assume, infinitely diverse and culture specific, but dwell in the universal part of our human condition.

Examples for this have been published by Volker Heeschen and Wulf Schiefenhövel for the Eipo, a formerly neolithic society in the isolated highlands of Western New Guinea. Humans have a surprising tendency to express deep emotions, like those of grief and romantic love, in artistically shaped language  - obviously, prose is insufficient for these situations in which individual or group perform in the family circle or on the stage of the village square. That modern literature, too, can well be analysed in an evolutionary framework has been convincingly shown by Joseph Carroll, Karl Eibl, Katja Mellmann and others.

Dissanayake quotes T. G. H. Strehlow, who compares the poetic language of the Aranda in Central Australia with the English poetry from Shakespeare to the romantics and describes verse rhythm as a “mould, in which the untidy scrap material of everyday speech is  melted and reshaped”.

Frits Staal and Richard Gardener describe in their film “Altar of Fire” the ritual language in Kerala, Southwest India, used during a Agnicayana, a Vedic ritual of sacrifice dating back about 3,000 years and probably the oldest surviving human ritual.