I’m interested in all these responses. Thank you.
From the perspective of our familiar world and the societies represented here, falsehood and deception seem as common as pavement. Yet I am still bemused and wondering. I remember reading a story long ago about some missionaries (I think they were missionaries) who were planning to visit a remote area far in the interior of a largely unexplored continent, where there were known to be cannibal tribes. The missionaries thought they would pave the way for their arrival by making their faces known to the people, so they air-dropped some gifts and supplies along with printed leaflets containing their photographs. The idea was that the tribespeople would associate their faces with the gifts, regard them as beneficent, and welcome them.
However, these people were primitive and unused to any of the conventions of what we call civilization. They had never seen photographs before, and they literally could not interpret what they were looking at. They saw abstract shapes and did not recognize them as faces. So when the missionaries arrived, they ate ‘em anyway.
Now, this story may or may not be literally true, but it does point to the fact that people who are not exposed to things we take for granted simply may not see what we see. Why would it necessarily occur to someone who sees that X is so to say instead that X is not so? What would put it into a person’s head to falsely report an experience or deny seeing what he has seen or otherwise use speech to utter something contradictory to his own knowledge? It’s one thing to harbor an unsupported belief or describe a dream or fantasy and quite another to knowingly and deliberately misrepresent understood reality.
So I am still entertaining the hypothesis that lying, like pavement, is an artifact of civilization and does not necessarily come naturally.
On the subject of what comes naturally, @aprilsimnel, I do have to differ with your generalization. Certainly anything a human being does is by definition within the capacity of human beings. But it does not all come naturally. Try a yoga class if you want to see what I mean.