Joseph Henrich
speaker
1,282 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard 25 May
Joseph Henrich’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And the nature of the institutions also changed, so monasteries became these transnational franchises, and artisans would have a journeyman phase in which they would go out to work with other masters after they finished training with this.
All this led to greater movement of ideas around Europe, which led to more rapid innovation.
Urbanization, of course, was rising during this whole period for the same reason.
Universities were one of the institutions
the voluntary associations that spread, and eventually Protestant gives rise to literacy.
All of these things come together to just create a much larger collective brain in Europe that eventually results in the Industrial Revolution and really gives birth to the modern world.
Well, it's great to be with you.
Yeah.
So a typical assumption when people think about this, if you put it in the Paleolithic, they assume that it has to do with some kind of genetic changes.
Now, Reich's lab, you know, there's no obviously big changes in the DNA.
So it's a little bit of a puzzle.
Neanderthals, for example, had larger brains.
And in primates, larger brains usually goes along with more computational abilities, more ability to solve problems.
So the expanding variant out of the Middle East, out of Africa, might have actually been less able at an individual level to process information.
But if you look back over the more recent period of human history, you can see that it's a story of expansions of different populations.
So, for example, in Africa, we have the Bantu expansion about 5,000 years ago, which actually eliminates a whole bunch of hunter-gatherer populations that previously existed in Africa.
We have the remnant populations in parts of the Congo, in the Kalahari, in the Hadza, for example, in Tanzania.
If you look at the Austronesian expansion, so that's the peopling of the Pacific.
That was the expansion of one group of people at the expense of others.
And of course, the Neolithic expansion into Europe is another example.
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