Quotes:
“Cultural complexity began to expand exponentially”
Once all three tribal instincts [the peer instinct, the hero instinct, and the ancestor instinct] were in place, in the last hundred thousand years, our forebears began to thrive and to live in recognizably human ways. Within an evolutionary eyeblink, they suddenly had much more sophisticated tools, weapons, arts, and rituals. After millions of years of achingly slow change, cultural complexity began to expand exponentially. The pools of shared knowledge in human communities began to accumulate across generations and adapt to local ecologies. This tribe-level learning (not heightened individual brainpower) is the secret to how our kind adapted to widely differing climates and terrains. Humans became the earth’s dominant species, threatened only by our own success.
Michael Morris, 2024 from the book Tribal: How the Cultural Instincts That Divide Us Can Help Bring Us Together
© 2024 Michael Morris