Coltan Scrivner

So instead, humans engage in a lot of what's called proactive aggression.

So this means that they sit back and they plan their aggression.

Zero killers are a good example of this.

But even like battles, like wartime battles, almost none of that is reactively aggressive unless you're defending yourself.

Most of it is you are planning and plotting on how you will attack another group of people.

This is the origins of conspiracies as well.

I mean, the classic conspiracy in the Roman Forum with Caesar, it was people who plotted to kill a powerful figure because he was powerful.

Individually, they couldn't do it themselves, so they had conspired to kill Caesar.

Wrangham argues that when language evolved, so let's say roughly 300,000 years ago, there's obviously quite a big error bar on either side of that, but let's say 300 or so thousand years ago, humans had this new ability to plot and plan and then share those plans with other people.

And that's something no other animal obviously has.

It's like sharing plans with someone and then planning to do something in the future.

And what that allowed humans to do is actually shift their social hierarchies, how their social structures were organized.

Because now, let's say the second ranking and third ranking or third ranking and fifth ranking chimp or human rather could plan together to overthrow the person who's at the top because maybe he's bad for the group.

Maybe it's not a selfish thing.

It's just he's bad for the group.

Nobody likes him.

Let's overthrow him and we can do it together.

Here's how we're going to do it.

And that completely shifted.

It made the human hierarchy more egalitarian than, say, a chimp hierarchy.