Joseph Henrich

materials for the end of it that you would use to drive into the seal.

And then, of course, you had to know what to do with the seal once you got it out.

They also made sleds and they made use of dogs and they made this special cold weather clothing.

So just an immense range of cultural knowledge.

Yeah, so that's the key thing is that the Neskallit benefited from this cumulative cultural evolution.

So over generations, this large body of knowledge had increasingly adapted the Inuit to surviving in this environment.

So it wasn't that they were smarter.

It's that they had this large body of cumulative knowledge, which Franklin's men did not have.

Well, this is the idea that really what our brains have evolved and why they've gotten so much bigger than our primate relatives or than our ancestors 2 million years ago is that our brains evolved to acquire, store, and organize cultural information.

So it's not that our brains have evolved to individually solve problems.

What we're really good at is taking advantage of all the information stored in the minds around us, in the minds of others, and then we acquire that.

And we can even create new things by recombining things that we acquire from different people.

Well, the collective brain emerges when people are learning from each other because information is flowing around from different minds.

And once you have this view, the ability of a society to generate innovation or creative ideas, this process of cumulative cultural evolution that we referred to before, is going to depend on the size of the population, the social interconnectedness among individuals, because that allows the information to flow, and the cognitive diversity in those minds.

So you're actually going to get more creativity and more innovation out of a population when you have a larger population that's more interconnected and more cognitively diverse.

And that's the collective brain.

That's right.

And you see this all over the place.

So, for example, when railroads were spreading across the U.S.

or in Sweden or in Germany, when a town got hooked into the larger collective brain, you begin to get more creative products coming from that town.