The first major revolution for Sapiens was the Cognitive Revolution. Before that point, Sapiens weren’t particularly special among animals. Over time, they had evolved the abilities to cross oceans and invent things like bows and arrows, sewing needles, oil lamps, and art. They had become humans that we’d recognize today, with our level of intelligence and creativity. But until the Cognitive Revolution of 70,000 years ago, they weren’t superior to other humans.
Although the use of fire hastened Sapiens’ ascent, it was the Cognitive Revolution that ultimately distinguished Sapiens from other humans.
What caused the Cognitive Revolution? No one’s really sure, but it was probably a chance gene mutation that changed the way the brain was wired.
The Cognitive Revolution involved the development of three new abilities, all related to language, that helped Homo sapiens outpace their fellow humans.
Their language gave Sapiens a huge advantage over their fellow animals, including their fellow humans.
Language itself isn’t particularly special—apes and monkeys communicate vocally, as do elephants, whales, and parrots. One reason the language of Sapiens was different was that it was more complex. Rather than communicating simple ideas the way green monkeys do (“Careful! A lion!” or “Careful! An eagle!”), the language of Sapiens could warn someone about a lion, describe its location, and plan how to deal with it. This allowed them to plan and follow through on complex actions like avoiding predators and working together to trap prey.
A second distinction of the Sapiens language was its ability to convey gossip. We think of gossip as a bad thing, but using language to convey information about other people is a way to build trust. Trust is critical for social cooperation, and cooperation gives you an advantage in the struggle to survive and pass on your genes.
Even today, most of our communication is gossip, if we define gossip as talking about other people. If we hear from a friend that the banker down the street offers fair interest rates on mortgage loans, we feel comfortable doing business with that banker, even though he’s a stranger. On the flip side, if we hear that the banker is a fraud, we stay away from her. Gossip helps us avoid strangers who may cheat us or be undependable.
Neanderthals probably didn’t have the capability to gossip. Their language was equipped to talk about lions and bison, but not other people. When they couldn’t talk about others, they couldn’t assess the trustworthiness and dependability of strangers. That meant they could only cooperate with the people they knew intimately, family members and close locals.
Because an animal can only know so many other animals intimately, the lack of the ability to gossip kept Neanderthal groups small. Sapiens, on the other hand, could form groups of up to 150 people. They didn’t need to know every group member personally to trust them. In a battle, a small group of Neanderthals was no match for a group of 150 Sapiens.
A third benefit of the Sapiens’ language was how it was used to create fictions, also known as “social constructs” or “imagined realities.”
Being able to communicate information about things that don’t exist doesn’t seem like an advantage. But Sapiens seem to be the only animals who have this ability to discuss things that don’t have a physical presence in the world, like money, human rights, corporations, and God.
For instance, you can’t convince a monkey to give you its banana on the argument that if it does, it will get unlimited bananas when it dies and goes to heaven. Your negotiations with monkeys are limited because you can only promise rewards that exist materially in this world. Monkeys can’t create imagined realities like heaven.
In and of itself, imagining things that don’t exist isn’t an asset—you won’t aid your chances of survival if you go into the forest looking for ghosts rather than berries and deer.
What’s important about the ability to create fictions is the ability to create collective fictions, fictions everyone believes. These collective myths allow people who’ve never met and otherwise would have nothing in common to cooperate under shared assumptions and goals.
Collective fictions aren’t the same as lies. These aren’t lies because everyone collectively believes them. For example, members of the UN weren’t lying when they insisted that Libya’s government respect the rights of its citizens, even though Libya, human rights, and the UN itself are all imaginary realities, or social constructs. The borders that separate Libya from other countries are man-made, not physical features of the landscape; human rights is a concept many of us believe in, but rights don’t exist outside our collective imagination; and, like Libya, the UN is a social construct, an organization that has no physical existence.
While humans lived without these social constructs for millennia, today, imaginary realities in some cases matter more than objective realities. For instance, the survival of actual entities like rain forests and endangered river dolphins depends on the charity of imaginary entities like the United States and non-profit organizations.
Let’s look at a modern example of how we unquestioningly accept imagined realities and treat them as real entities.
Example: Peugeot and the Power of Entities that Don’t Exist
Does the carmaker Peugeot exist?
It must. The corporation employs 200,000 people, makes 1.5 million cars a year, and earns about 55 billion euros annually.
But in what way does Peugeot exist? Can you locate it in physical reality?
The company isn’t its cars. The cars could all go away and the company would still exist.
The company isn’t its employees, its factories, or its machinery. A natural disaster could wipe out every factory and every employee, and the company would still exist and be able to get a loan, build new factories, and hire new workers.
The company is not its founder (who’s dead) or its managers and shareholders, who could be dismissed today without threatening the company’s existence.
So how can it exist? Peugeot, as with other corporations, has no existence in the physical world. It’s an idea, a collective myth we all agree to believe in. This myth is so powerful that this imaginary entity can buy property, pay taxes, open a bank account, and be bound by laws.
We grant these legal fictions, called limited liability companies, the same rights as people (the concept of “rights” is a fiction, too). We treat LLCs like flesh-and-blood people.
The Birth of Limited Liability Companies
The Problem
It wasn’t always the case that a business owner could divorce himself from his business. In the 13th century, before the (imaginary) existence of LLCs, if you owned a business, you were personally liable for everything that happened with that business.
So if your product broke, your customer could sue you personally. If you borrowed money and the business flopped, you had to pay back the debt out of pocket. If you couldn’t, you might have to sell your personal property or sell your children into servitude.
When you are your business and your business is you, starting a business is a scary prospect. People didn’t want to take the financial risk, and this impeded entrepreneurship.
The Solution
The solution to this problem was limited liability companies. The company became an entity independent of its founder, manager, or any other person or physical entity.
We’re so used to these corporations that we forget they’re imaginary, existing only in our minds and invented only to shield their founders from too much personal responsibility.
Back to Peugeot
Often, the problem with imaginary things is that it’s hard to get others to believe them (their power comes only with collective belief in them). But in France in the 1890s, if you got a lawyer to go through the ritual required of the French legal code (another fiction), involving writing down the correct words on a fancy sheet of paper and signing it, you could create a totally imaginary company that millions of French citizens would tacitly agree to believe.
French law validated the existence of Peugeot. In other words, one imaginary entity legitimized another imaginary entity.
We can see the advantages of flexible language, gossip, and shared fictions by comparing chimp social groups with Sapiens social groups.
When chimps become alpha males, leaders of their troops, it’s usually due to the fact that they’ve created strong social ties with the members of the group. But in order for this social structure to work, everyone in the troop has to know the others well. Chimps who haven’t met won’t trust each other and won’t know who is of higher rank.
The fact that everyone has to know one another limits the troops to between 20 and 50 chimps. Otherwise, the group destabilizes and the troop breaks up into smaller troops, which generally don’t cooperate with each other.
Until the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens functioned in social groups similar to those of chimps. But the ability to gossip meant that members didn’t have to know all the other members intimately—they could know them through word of mouth.
This means that Sapiens social groups can be much bigger than chimp social groups. But you can still only effectively gossip about a maximum of 150 people—beyond this number, it’s just too hard to keep track of all the people. Even today, businesses with fewer than 150 people don’t necessarily need concrete rules and a clear hierarchy to function. Because everyone knows each other well, social bonds keep the order. Beyond 150 people, the group becomes chaotic as there’s no way to be intimately connected with, or gossip about, so many people.
So gossip was a good first step toward creating large, cohesive groups (and, consequently, dominating other animals, including humans). But Sapiens have managed to found cities, nations, and empires of hundreds of millions of subjects. How did they cross the 150 threshold?
This is where common myths, or collective fictions, come into play. Cities, nations, and empires aren’t real entities. They exist only in the collective mind of the group.
For example, churches can hold sway over millions of people all over the world because of the belief system that binds their followers to each other, even when they’re strangers and have nothing else in common.
Likewise, citizens of a nation are often tied together by common ideals established by the nation’s founders and the shared stories they tell the world about themselves.
If we could only talk about things that really existed, like rivers, mountains, and lions, we’d never be able to form the powerful social and cooperative networks created by “imaginary” entities like churches and nations. The world would be chaotic.
Although imagined, these myths are crucial. Without collective fictions, the systems built on them collapse. And as we’ll see, most of our modern systems are built on these imagined realities. These myths are powerful, and the fact that they’re not rooted in objective reality doesn’t undermine them.
Collective fictions allowed early Sapiens to cooperate within extremely large groups of people they’d never met, and it rapidly changed their social behavior.
The Neanderthals were perhaps the human species, other than Sapiens, most likely to survive. As we’ve learned, they had strong bodies and large brains and were superior to Sapiens in both these qualities.
But in the struggle for dominance and, ultimately, survival, they were no match for Sapiens. The Cognitive Revolution, and the language, fictions, and cooperative skills that came with it, gave Sapiens a leg up in trade and hunting.
Archeologists find shells from distant coasts in Sapiens settlements, showing that Sapiens must have traveled far and been good navigators. Both navigation and interaction with strangers necessitates good communication skills, cooperation, and shared myths. For instance, you need to be able to trust strangers to trade with them. Foreign Sapiens traders probably engendered this trust by calling upon a shared mythical ancestor or god. They probably also used the trust that comes from believing in the same myths to trade information, widening their network of knowledge.
There’s no evidence that Neanderthals traded. They made their tools from local materials. In fact, no other animals trade. Sapiens had a huge advantage here.
While Neanderthals hunted by themselves or in small family groups, Sapiens hunted in large, cooperative groups. Because there were so many of them, and they knew how to communicate effectively, Sapiens could surround an entire herd of wild horses, chase them into a tight spot where they were trapped, and slaughter them.
If Neanderthals and Sapiens were living in the same area and competing for the same food sources, Sapiens usually won.
Usually, it takes a genetic mutation to significantly change behavior, and that takes hundreds, if not hundreds of thousands, of years.
For example, common chimpanzees live in hierarchical groups led by the alpha male, whereas their relatives the bonobos live in egalitarian groups led by females. Chimps can’t suddenly decide that they too want to live in an egalitarian society. Their social behavior is ingrained in their genes. Such a change would have to come from their DNA.
Until the Cognitive Revolution, the social and technological evolution of Sapiens also depended on changes in DNA. But the Cognitive Revolution—and the language, collective fictions, and cooperation it brought with it—allowed Sapiens to evolve much faster than other humans. We can now change our social structures, interpersonal behavior, and economic behavior within decades, rather than over hundreds of years.
Example: The Power of the Pope
We can see how the advent of “fictions” made social evolution independent of biological evolution in the example of the Pope.
In the societies of our chimp relatives, the alpha male uses his position of power to mate with as many females as possible, ensuring that he passes his genes to the next generation. In the animal world, this is the primary, instinctive goal—to survive long enough to pass on your DNA and keep your ancestral line alive. The sole purpose of gaining power is to help you survive and procreate.
However, in modern human societies, power is divorced from procreation and institutions are passed along not through genes but through fictions.
For example, Catholic priests, Buddhist monks, and Chinese eunuchs all hold sway over their societies. They’re also meant to be celibate. Their celibacy isn’t the result of limited resources or a lack of females. It’s also not the product of a genetic mutation.
There’s no genetic basis or survival need for the Catholic Church, but it hasn’t died out. It’s passed from one generation to the next via stories rather than genes.