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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Dwarkesh Podcast · Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution · 12 Mar 2025 podcast

So in mammals, mammals live in larger groups when they have to deal with predators.

And the predator guild in Africa at that point was quite thick.

There were a lot of deadly predators.

So paleoanthropologists think that our ancestors may have lived in large savanna-dwelling apes.

And if you have a lot of individuals, if the culture is sparse, the bigger the group, the more chance that there's someone doing something useful in the larger group.

And so that means it's easier to get across the threshold.

So those are three of the main factors that might have allowed our lineage as opposed to all the other lineages around to cross this.

We're already a big brain primate.

We had hands.

We're living in these large groups on the savannah and the climate change during this period so as to make us –

Yeah.

And how big were these groups?

Well, I mean, nobody's really sure, but maybe a few hundred individuals.

Okay.

Yeah.

So, I mean, lots of different evidence suggests that groups were moving trade goods.

So well back in the Paleolithic, we see trade.

Often we see some genetic transmission.

Right, the expansions and so forth.

And so talking about the expansion, like that's something where the ancient DNA is useful because the Neanderthals in Europe, the DNA suggests they lived in very small groups.

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