Chapter 2: The Collective Brain: Exchange and Specialization after 200,000 years ago (The Rational Optimist)

There is a single twitch of progress in biface hand-axe history: around 600,000 years ago, the design suddenly becomes a little more symmetrical. This coincides with the appearance o f a new species of hominid which replaces its ancestor throughout Eurasia and Africa. Called Homo heidelbergensis, this creature has a much bigger brain, possibly 25 per cent bigger than late Homo erectus. Its brain was almost as big as a modern person’s. Yet not only did it go on making hand axes and very little else; the hand-axe design sank back into stagnation for another half a million years. We are used to thinking that technology and innovation go together, yet here is strong evidence that when human beings became tool makers, they did not experience anything remotely resembling cultural progress. They just did what they did very well. They did not change.

In most hunter-gatherers, women spend long hours gathering, preparing and cooking staple foods while men are out hunting for delicacies. There is, incidentally, no hunter-gatherer society that dispenses with cooking. Cooking is the most female-biased o f all activities, the only exceptions being when men prepare some ritual feasts or grill a few snacks while out on the hunt. (Does this ring any modern bells? Fancy chefs and barbecuing are the two most masculine forms of cooking today.)

Just to be clear, this argument has nothing to do with the notion that ‘a woman’s place is in the home’ while men go out to work. Women work hard in hunter-gatherer societies, often harder than men. Neither gathering nor hunting is especially good evolutionary preparation for sitting at a desk answering the telephone. Anthropologists used to argue that the sexual division of labor came about because of the long, helpless childhood of human beings. Because women could not abandon their babies, they could not hunt game, so they stayed near the home and gathered and cooked food of the kind that was compatible with caring for children.

As a broad generalization, the more people trust each other in a society, the more prosperous that society is, and trust growth seems to precede income growth. This can be measured by a combination of questionnaires and experiments – leaving a wallet on the street and seeing if it is returned, for instance. Or asking people, in their native tongue, ‘generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted, or that you cannot be too careful in dealing with people?’ By these measures, Norway is heaving with trust (65 per cent trust each other) and wealthy, while Peru is wallowing in mistrust (5 per cent trust each other) and poor. ‘A 15% increase in the proportion o f people in a country who think others are trustworthy,’ says Paul Zak, ‘raises income per person by 1% per year for every year thereafter.’

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Related posts:

1. Prologue (The Rational Optimist)
2. Chapter 5: The Triumph of Cities: Trade after 5,000 Years Ago (The Rational Optimist)
3. Chapter 6: Escaping Malthus’s Trap: Population after 1200 (The Rational Optimist)
4. Chapter 7: The Release of Slaves: Energy after 1700 (The Rational Optimist)