Everyday conversational narratives of personal experience might be regarded as the country ³cousins of more well-wrought narratives. The work of archaeologist Nicholas Toth revolutionized the understanding of Stone Age tools. Prior to Toth’s studies, the received perspective was that early hominids chipped a cobble in such a way that it could be used ¹as a pick or a hand ax. Researchers considered the splintered flakes as waste products and examined them for information about techniques used to shape the stone core tool. While others were analyzing the morphological shapes and cognitive correlates of the ⁴chipped cores, Toth, in a radical turnabout, discovered that the flakes were the primary tools and that the large stone was an incidental by-product, possibly a secondary tool. The flakes ⁵turned out to be “extremely effective cutting tools” for animals, wood, ⁶hides, and other work. We posit that, like stone flakes, mundane conversational narratives of personal experience constitute the prototype of narrative activity rather than the ²flawed by-product of more artful and planned narrative discourse.