Storytelling

Humans tell stories.  Its what we do.  We've been doing it since Gog and Ogg sat down by the light of the firebeast they had tamed and talked about how the hunting was over the next ridge.  Gog probably embellished the encounter he had with a wolf, and Ogg had to one up him somehow. 
The oldest know literature is around five thousand years old.  Think about that for a minute.  Depending on your point of view, humanity (anatomically modern humans, that is) is between six thousand (the Bishop Usher estimate) and 200000 years old. I fall in the second camp.  So, out of 200,000 years of human existence, we have six thousand years of writing down our stories.  What I find interesting is we still tell those stories.  We still read them.  Although, I will admit, I'm going to be looking for a copy of the Instructions of Shuruppak for my Kindle.
So, what's the oldest thing you've read?  I've read bits of the Epic of Gilgamesh - not the parts that were stolen and reworked into the Bible, which is 3900 years old, give or take.  Then my reading jumps forward about 1100 years - the Illiad and the Odyssey. 
How does all this tie into writing?  Well, if you want to write well, you need to read.  The more widely you read, they better you will write.  I've read modern versions of the classics - David Drake has re-written the Odyssey and the Argonautica as science fiction.  Drake has also taken ancient Sumarian forms and used them as the basis for other works.  There are reasons that we continue to look at these writings, even in an age when writing without gender bias and getting away from gendernormative literature is supposed to be the norm.  They're wonking great stories at the core, and that's what you want to write.