Joseph Henrich

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.

So rather than having local rituals and local myths, many communities would get together periodically to initiate the young men.

And this would help bond that whole group.

There'd be an exchange of technology and teaching that goes on at these.

They'd spent a few months in the same place.

So there was a lot of time for transmission.

Well, eventually the groups have to meet and they're going to compete over territories.

And a bunch of different things can occur.