Joseph Henrich

There were some long interglacials, but the soonest one before that was 120,000 years ago.

Other than that, they were getting broken up.

I sometimes wonder if we may someday figure out that there were actually a little bit of agriculture.

And it would have all been destroyed by the Ice Age, right?

So it's not clear that there would be any heritage of it left.

So we would have to find some remnants of some, you know, domesticated crops.

Yeah, if they had gotten to any scale.

But we know from modern societies there are groups, for example, in the Amazon that have root-based agriculture that wouldn't leave any archaeological record.

Well, this gives me a chance to tell you something we've been working on.

So we were talking about this, the kinship hypothesis, the idea that kinship intensity affects psychology.

And when I presented the ideas that are in the weirdest people in the world, I get a hard time sometimes from historians who will have some kind of very European specific story about why this happened that has to do with European royalty or coal or something like that.

And so my move is to, you know, not try to get into the weeds and start reading Latin text, but to go test it somewhere else.

So if it's true that kinship intensity should work like this, then we should be able to test it somewhere else.

So we have a large corpus, two different corpus from China.

And so we have late imperial China, something called the gazetteers, which were produced across the prefectures.

And they had a stylized content.

So this is the same genre, thousands of books.

And then we have about 7,000 books going back 2,000 years in Chinese history.

And the techniques that the AI is allowing us to do is to get measurements of psychology from the texts.

So we take a questionnaire.