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
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.
And there's a belt, which the historian Anne Morris calls the Lucky Latitudes, which runs from basically southern China all the way through to the Mediterranean.
And ideas are just flowing back and forth there.
Interesting.
But you also ended up with more complex state bureaucracies and the kinds of things that allow you to organize and move people around and whatnot.
Yeah.
Well, you can think of institutions that eventually lead to state capacity as just part of the innovative process of the collective brain.
So if you have more groups experimenting with more different ways of governing groups of people, gradually you get the accumulation of the pieces that you can put together into different kinds of states.
Yeah, we definitely don't know exactly what it was.
So, we know that this population expanded, and there does seem to be some tool indications to suggest more complex technology.
Probably, technology usually goes along with social organization.
So, for example, if you look at Australia, which is a continent of hunter-gatherers, there's an expansion about 6,000 years ago out of northern Australia, which eventually takes up seven-eighths of the continent.
And they had a new social organization, including rules about who you marry.
You had linguistic exogamy and rituals that interconnected populations.
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