Sapiens: a brief History of Humankind

4.
 An ivory figurine of a ‘lion-man’ (or ‘lioness-woman’) from the Stadel Cave in Germany (
c
.32,000 years

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ago). The body is human, but the head is leonine. This is one of the first indisputable examples of art, and
probably of religion, and of the ability of the human mind to imagine things that do not really exist
.
The amount of information that one must obtain and store in order to track the
ever-changing relationships of a few dozen individuals is staggering. (In a band of
fty individuals, there are 1,225 one-on-one relationships, and countless more
complex social combinations.) All apes show a keen interest in such social
information, but they have trouble gossiping e ectively. Neanderthals and archaic
Homo sapiens
probably also had a hard time talking behind each other’s backs – a
much maligned ability which is in fact essential for cooperation in large numbers.
The new linguistic skills that modern Sapiens acquired about seventy millennia
ago enabled them to gossip for hours on end. Reliable information about who
could be trusted meant that small bands could expand into larger bands, and
Sapiens could develop tighter and more sophisticated types of cooperation.
1
The gossip theory might sound like a joke, but numerous studies support it. Even
today the vast majority of human communication – whether in the form of emails,
phone calls or newspaper columns – is gossip. It comes so naturally to us that it
seems as if our language evolved for this very purpose. Do you think that history
professors chat about the reasons for World War One when they meet for lunch, or
that nuclear physicists spend their co ee breaks at scienti c conferences talking
about quarks? Sometimes. But more often, they gossip about the professor who
caught her husband cheating, or the quarrel between the head of the department
and the dean, or the rumours that a colleague used his research funds to buy a
Lexus. Gossip usually focuses on wrongdoings. Rumour-mongers are the original
fourth estate, journalists who inform society about and thus protect it from cheats
and freeloaders.
Most likely, both the gossip theory and the there-is-a-lion-near-the-river theory are
valid. Yet the truly unique feature of our language is not its ability to transmit
information about men and lions. Rather, it’s the ability to transmit information
about things that do not exist at all. As far as we know, only Sapiens can talk
about entire kinds of entities that they have never seen, touched or smelled.
Legends, myths, gods and religions appeared for the rst time with the
Cognitive Revolution. Many animals and human species could previously say,
‘Careful! A lion!’ Thanks to the Cognitive Revolution, 
Homo sapiens
acquired the
ability to say, ‘The lion is the guardian spirit of our tribe.’ This ability to speak
about fictions is the most unique feature of Sapiens language.
It’s relatively easy to agree that only 
Homo sapiens
can speak about things that
don’t really exist, and believe six impossible things before breakfast. You could
never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless

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bananas after death in monkey heaven. But why is it important? After all, ction
can be dangerously misleading or distracting. People who go to the forest looking
for fairies and unicorns would seem to have less chance of survival than people
who go looking for mushrooms and deer. And if you spend hours praying to non-
existing guardian spirits, aren’t you wasting precious time, time better spent
foraging, fighting and fornicating?
But ction has enabled us not merely to imagine things, but to do so