Joseph Henrich

So if you have institutions, for example, that interconnect your population, you can maintain more sophisticated technology.

And some paleoanthropologists, for example, have speculated, with some evidence, that the expanding populations had projectile weapons, so bows and arrows.

And humans have periodically gained and lost bows and arrows in different parts of the world.

So in Australia, for example, bows and arrows are never invented.

In the New World, when the arrivals populations probably didn't have bows and arrows, but then later developed bows and arrows.

Although the new world, everybody has dogs and you can pull carts with dogs.

Yeah.

So I've never really bought that.

Unfortunately, you can use llamas in the new world to pull carts as well.

People do that today.

Yeah.

So what's your explanation for why there's no wheels in the new world?

Well, so there were wheels on Mayan carts or Mayan toys.

My explanation is just the collective brain.

So almost every single first invention of something big that we think is important for humans was invented in Eurasia.

And Eurasia, as Jared Diamond famously pointed out, building on other people's work, it's the largest continent by far.

It has the biggest population.

It's also oriented along an east-west axis.

Mm-hmm.

Which allows ideas and people to more easily flow.