Joseph Henrich

Right.

So this is one particular group of humans.

And one of the things we talked about earlier in this conversation was the cultural evolution of epistemology.

So it was the improvement in what constitutes evidence, what constitutes a good argument that allows us to get to science and accumulate this kind of knowledge faster.

to do these kinds of things.

So I see that as part of the continuous trajectory, but it's just that we have new cognitive tools.

Well, so what we know from other species is that lots of animals use tools, and particularly chimpanzees use tools.

So we can assume tools in the common ancestor.

Now, what we see in the paleoanthropological record is the increasing use of stone tools.

Yeah.

And these are pretty simple stone tools.

Like you can define it.

You can see a cutting edge there, but not very much fancier than that.

And then fire is a lot of animals are afraid of fire and they have to run from wildfires and stuff like that.

So whatever your story about humans is, you have to overcome the fear of the fire in order to tame it.

Probably humans first found wildfire and somebody approached the fire instead of running away, which is the usual thing to do.

And then got some of it and then put it to use, I guess.

Yeah.

So.

So I think it's the innate fear that animals have of fire, which is we don't hang around when things get tough.