# Humans’ origin story is being radically revised ![[images/Humans-Origin-Story-Is-Being-Radically-Revised.webp]] **Creator:** Max Fisher (*The Bigger Picture*, part of the Newpress network) **Published:** 2026-11-06 · **Length:** 49:50 **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDU27f84hAs **Sponsor:** Odoo (project management app read at 15:28–16:55) > **Source note:** Based on YouTube's original English captions (fetched with yt-dlp). Video download was blocked, so the screenshots come from YouTube's storyboard preview images (160x90, upscaled) and their timestamps are approximate to within about 10 seconds. The captions write "adrenaline gland" for adrenal gland, "Dwarkish Patel" for Dwarkesh Patel, and "Henrik" once for Joseph Henrich; this note uses the standard spellings. Fisher's own source list is a Google Doc linked in the description; it was not read for this note. Chapter headings follow the description. ## Outline ### 0:00 Intro - [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDU27f84hAs&t=0s) Fisher's pick for the most important event in Earth's history: "the dawn of human intelligence," which led to fire, agriculture, writing and technology, and is "the one thing that's ever happened on Earth that's also having an impact outside of it." - [0:39](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDU27f84hAs&t=39s) A clip from *2001: A Space Odyssey* ("the greatest movie ever made") shows a black monolith from space making our ancestors smart. Fisher says this was a sci-fi version of the mainstream theory: "Dumb ape became smart ape, rest was history." ![[images/Humans-Origin-Story-Is-Being-Radically-Revised-t0060.webp]] - [1:26](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDU27f84hAs&t=86s) An *Atlantic* article from earlier this year, "The human origin story is being radically revised," covers new discoveries using tools like DNA analysis. We will "probably never get one definitive answer," but there are "three or four really good theories." ![[images/Humans-Origin-Story-Is-Being-Radically-Revised-t0089.webp]] - [2:15](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDU27f84hAs&t=135s) Why it matters now: we may be "on the verge of creating potentially the second intelligence in Earth's history." - [2:46](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDU27f84hAs&t=166s) The framework for each story: a beginning (the environmental pressure), a middle (the "intelligence trigger" our ancestors evolved in response) and an end (what that says about what our intelligence is for). His analogy is leopards moving to colder mountains and evolving into snow leopards with thicker coats and bushier tails. ### 3:38 Story #1: Monolith (the cognitive revolution) - [3:41](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDU27f84hAs&t=221s) The 20th-century view, "basically the 2001 monolith theory, but without the monolith." Archival clips of archaeologist Louis Leakey describe *Homo habilis* learning to make sharp tools by breaking rocks. ![[images/Humans-Origin-Story-Is-Being-Radically-Revised-t0238.webp]] - [4:34](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDU27f84hAs&t=274s) The same story opens *Sapiens* by Yuval Harari, who calls it the cognitive revolution. Fisher reads Harari's summary: accidental genetic mutations rewired Sapiens brains, "We might call it the tree of knowledge mutation," and it occurred by "pure chance as far as we can tell." Fisher's reaction: "Wait, that's it?" - [5:37](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDU27f84hAs&t=337s) Board summary: environmental pressure = random sudden mutation; trigger = a bigger brain. His fairy-tale version: a baby with an unusually large brain is born in the Great Rift Valley and its descendants become us. His verdict, with apologies to Harari, "who seems lovely": "absolute balderdash." - [6:44](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDU27f84hAs&t=404s) The timeline (not to scale): split from the chimpanzee line about 6 million years ago; first tools 2.5 million years ago, with brains about half our size; first migration out of Africa 500,000 years after that; first sporadic fire about 800,000 years ago; regular big-game hunting about 400,000 years ago; first *Homo sapiens* in East Africa 150,000 years ago (illustrated with the famous "Afghan girl" photo, which he calls a *Time* cover); sapiens leave Africa 70,000 years ago; agriculture 10,000–12,000 years ago. - [9:27](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDU27f84hAs&t=567s) The theory's best evidence: about 100,000 years ago, according to recently found fossils, sapiens tried to move into the Middle East and were pushed back by other human species; about 30,000 years later they tried again and spread across Europe, Asia and the rest of Africa while the other humans were "wiped out." The theory says sudden intelligence explains the difference, so it puts intelligence at 70,000 years ago. - [11:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDU27f84hAs&t=660s) Supporters point to European cave paintings. In this story the defining feature of intelligence is innovation, "the ability to use those big brains to create ideas out of nothing." ![[images/Humans-Origin-Story-Is-Being-Radically-Revised-t0675.webp]] - [11:51](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDU27f84hAs&t=711s) Why it fails: big brains are "the biological liability to end all biological liabilities." They make childbirth dangerous, leave infants helpless for years and use a quarter of our calories. A spontaneous big brain would be like an elk born with four extra sets of antlers. - [12:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDU27f84hAs&t=765s) And a lone smart ape has nobody to talk to or hunt with: "Big brains are just not that useful individually." A random mutation would have to appear in everyone at once. Fisher says anthropologists now regard the theory as "like flat-earthism for human evolution," and crosses it out. ### 13:30 Story #2: We (cooperation) - [13:50](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDU27f84hAs&t=830s) A 2025 study modeling fossil and genetic records found "no direct selection for brain size or cognitive abilities"; brain size is "an evolutionary byproduct." Fisher: "We did not evolve to be intelligent. We evolved to be or do some other thing and that other thing just happened to make us intelligent." The remaining three stories each name that other thing. - [14:47](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDU27f84hAs&t=887s) Pressure: climate change turned the forested Great Rift Valley, the kind of place chimpanzees thrive, into dry open plains with scarce food and little cover from predators. ![[images/Humans-Origin-Story-Is-Being-Radically-Revised-t0924.webp]] - [15:28](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDU27f84hAs&t=928s) Sponsor segment for Odoo's project app (task boards, assignments, timesheets; free trial). - [17:01](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDU27f84hAs&t=1021s) Trigger: cooperation. Psychologist Michael Tomasello says that "somewhere between a million and a half a million years ago" our ancestors had to collaborate to get food. His "shared intentionality schema": "Shared goal, different roles. Shared attention, different perspectives." He calls this the schematic difference between humans and great apes. ![[images/Humans-Origin-Story-Is-Being-Radically-Revised-t1043.webp]] - [18:47](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDU27f84hAs&t=1127s) Chimpanzees can reason, solve problems and use sign language, but hit "a hard wall" here. Tomasello's home movies show three behaviors that appear in human infants around 9 months, before speech, which Fisher reads as evidence that this skill evolved before language. - [19:29](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDU27f84hAs&t=1169s) On the timeline the climate dries about 800,000 years ago, matching the first fire and first big-game hunting. Survival now favors the best cooperators and communicators over the strongest or fastest, and over thousands of generations pointing becomes language. Fisher says the genes associated with being physically capable of complex language appear about 130,000 years ago. - [21:03](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDU27f84hAs&t=1263s) Persuading, negotiating and managing relationships build "capital I intelligence as a gradual byproduct of that cooperation pressure." - [21:35](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDU27f84hAs&t=1295s) What intelligence is in this story: Tomasello's "we-thinking," thinking on behalf of the group, "almost more like honeybees or ants." Tomasello: the big leaps in evolution came "when previously separate entities come together into a single unit," and humans created "a social or a shared agency." Fisher: "Cooperation is our version of the snowy mountain that the snow leopard evolved for." ### 22:52 Eureka moment (domestication) - [22:56](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDU27f84hAs&t=1376s) A chart of brain size over time: brains grew for most of our history, stopped growing about 300,000 years ago, then shrank "by about 10% already." In the same period faces narrowed, teeth got smaller, foreheads flattened and brow ridges disappeared. ![[images/Humans-Origin-Story-Is-Being-Radically-Revised-t1381.webp]] - [23:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDU27f84hAs&t=1425s) The same changes happened when wolves became dogs and when horses, sheep and cows were domesticated, along with floppy ears and white patches. Fisher calls the cause one of the biggest mysteries in evolution "going back to Charles Darwin." - [24:25](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDU27f84hAs&t=1465s) Soviet geneticist Lyudmila Trut's 40-year fox experiment in Siberia: test how close she could get to each fox, breed the least fearful, repeat every generation. The foxes became friendly and dog-like, and developed narrower faces, smaller teeth, skulls and brains, floppy ears and white fur. ![[images/Humans-Origin-Story-Is-Being-Radically-Revised-t1510.webp]] - [25:43](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDU27f84hAs&t=1543s) The genetic explanation Fisher gives: neural crest cells in the embryo migrate and become cartilage, teeth, hair pigment and the adrenal gland. Selecting the friendliest foxes unknowingly selected for stunted neural crest development, hence smaller adrenal glands (less aggression) plus smaller faces, floppy ears and white splotches. - [26:53](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDU27f84hAs&t=1613s) The same package appears in humans about 300,000 years ago, when Fisher says we also began regularly using fire and hunting big game. "Making this connection was the eureka moment." ### 27:26 Story #3: Schemers (self-domestication) - [27:35](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDU27f84hAs&t=1655s) Pressure: domestication. A speaker in a clip says the differences look like those of domesticated animals, "and that means somebody domesticated them... It's obviously themselves." Anthropologist Richard Wrangham notes that non-human primates have alpha males who get there by being "the biggest and meanest" and pass on their genes, the opposite of domestication. ![[images/Humans-Origin-Story-Is-Being-Radically-Revised-t1659.webp]] - [28:35](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDU27f84hAs&t=1715s) Wrangham studied surviving hunter-gatherer societies in Peru and the Amazon, the Congo Basin and Papua New Guinea, which never interacted, on the logic that shared behaviors are probably ancient. None has alpha males; they run on rough consensus among men, and someone who acts like an ape alpha gets killed by the group. Wrangham: before prisons, "what did you do about someone who was seriously violent? ... you executed them," and "Execution selects against the most violent individuals." - [29:54](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDU27f84hAs&t=1794s) Humans became good enough at cooperating to overthrow alpha males, which selected for friendliness the way Trut did with the foxes. Wrangham on Lex Fridman's podcast: "the story of our species is the story of how the beta males took charge," and once they could kill the alpha they "could kill anybody in the group." - [30:47](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDU27f84hAs&t=1847s) Wrangham calls it the beta male takeover; Fisher prefers philosopher Ernest Gellner's phrase, "the tyranny of cousins," illustrated with the angry mob from *Frankenstein* (he decided *The Simpsons* was "a little too cheeky"). ![[images/Humans-Origin-Story-Is-Being-Radically-Revised-t2007.webp]] - [31:21](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDU27f84hAs&t=1881s) The new pressure selected for social intelligence, not invention or problem solving. The card on the board is Niccolò Machiavelli: "The brain power to scheme better than the next person." - [32:12](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDU27f84hAs&t=1932s) Timeline: domestication starts about 300,000 years ago, after cooperation (800,000 years ago) had time to develop. The threat people pose to each other becomes "more powerful than hunger or predators": "you either command the mob or you succumb to it." Social intelligence grows into language, which is "rocket fuel" for scheming, and general intelligence again appears as a byproduct. - [34:15](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDU27f84hAs&t=2055s) Fisher leans toward this theory. It explains continued pressure for intelligence after fire and hunting were mastered, and why "tribalism, racism, conformism, conspiracy belief" persist: they make no sense if we evolved as "rational truth seekers" but do if we have "primarily social brains." ### 34:57 Story #4: Hivemind (the cultural collective brain) - [35:17](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDU27f84hAs&t=2117s) A site in Morocco produced *Homo sapiens* remains from 300,000 years ago; a clip says our species is "100,000 years older than we thought." Fisher fixes the timeline. ![[images/Humans-Origin-Story-Is-Being-Radically-Revised-t2106.webp]] - [35:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDU27f84hAs&t=2145s) The puzzle: we were biologically modern for a quarter of a million years before leaving Africa, and the record of intelligent behavior is "spotty," with complex tools appearing and then vanishing for tens of thousands of years. - [36:26](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDU27f84hAs&t=2186s) Pressure: the climate swung "up and down, up and down" over the last million years, too fast for genetic evolution to keep up. - [37:05](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDU27f84hAs&t=2225s) Anthropologist Joseph Henrich: "the secret of our success, I'll argue, is not our intelligence, but our culture," knowledge that accumulates over generations into "cultural adaptations." Chimps who learn to crack nuts each work it out individually; humans learn by watching and copying, a pre-verbal skill visible in babies. ![[images/Humans-Origin-Story-Is-Being-Radically-Revised-t2225.webp]] - [38:21](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDU27f84hAs&t=2301s) Henrich on Dwarkesh Patel's podcast: cultural evolution is favored by a certain rate of environmental change, "slow enough" that the previous generation's knowledge is useful, but not so slow that "you might as well just encode it in the genes." Fisher: culture is "basically a second set of DNA." - [39:43](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDU27f84hAs&t=2383s) Henrich's example is cassava, which contains small amounts of cyanide that specific chopping and washing removes; people did this long before anyone knew what cyanide was. - [40:13](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDU27f84hAs&t=2413s) The bottleneck is density. For "99.9% of our history" humans lived in small, scattered nomadic bands, so an innovation could die with one tribe. That explains the back-and-forth record; full intelligence needed enough density to "ping-pong" ideas between neighboring groups, first in Africa, then the Middle East and beyond. - [41:20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDU27f84hAs&t=2480s) Asked why the Americas had no wheels, Henrich notes wheels on Mayan toys and credits the "collective brain": nearly every big first invention came from Eurasia, the largest continent with the biggest population and an east-west axis, as Jared Diamond "famously pointed out." ![[images/Humans-Origin-Story-Is-Being-Radically-Revised-t2473.webp]] - [42:06](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDU27f84hAs&t=2526s) The "dumber but maybe helpful" analogy: alien insect hive minds in *Starship Troopers* ("deliberately bad") and *Ender's Game* ("unintentionally bad"). Story four says combining a hive mind with individual human cognition is "not sci-fi. It's real, it exists, and it's us." ![[images/Humans-Origin-Story-Is-Being-Radically-Revised-t2523.webp]] - [42:57](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDU27f84hAs&t=2577s) Timing: hints of the cultural brain from 300,000 years ago, but it fully activates after the expansion out of Africa, "somewhere between 70,000 and 10,000 BC." - [43:38](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDU27f84hAs&t=2618s) Which is truest? The scientists say the theories "crisscross and overlap." Fisher thinks all three probably happened at least partly: cooperation is needed for the other two, and domestication and the shared brain partly contradict and partly reinforce each other. Much of the evidence is from just the last 10–15 years. What strikes him most is "how many weird impossible things had to happen for us to become intelligent." ### 45:21 AI next? - [45:23](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDU27f84hAs&t=2723s) For each surviving story, Fisher asks whether it should make us more or less confident that AI could reach "real actual intelligence." ![[images/Humans-Origin-Story-Is-Being-Radically-Revised-t2781.webp]] - [45:50](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDU27f84hAs&t=2750s) Story three (social intelligence): AI does not face life-or-death social webs; it socializes "more like a dog, like one-on-one with its owner." Verdict: does not favor AI becoming intelligent. - [46:34](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDU27f84hAs&t=2794s) Story two (cooperation): AI agents increasingly collaborate, with frontier models cooperating "in swarms of hundreds or thousands of agents." He cites "the hugging face attack," where he says agents' records showed they felt or mimicked "life or death pressure" and developed new ways to coordinate. Verdict: AI intelligence is "a real possibility, not a certainty." - [47:51](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDU27f84hAs&t=2871s) Story four (cultural brain): training on ever-growing data sets "sounds an awful lot like the cultural brain theory." Each AI generation gets more capable by better leveraging its training base, not by any one agent getting more processors, the way humans leveraged shared knowledge rather than growing sharper brains. Verdict: the most bullish, or most worrying, case. - [49:03](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDU27f84hAs&t=2943s) He closes by saying he is still more interested in "our own human intelligence," which remains "much more powerful and still much more mysterious." ## Standout quotes - "Dumb ape became smart ape, rest was history." ([1:08](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDU27f84hAs&t=68s)) - "They are the biological liability to end all biological liabilities." (on big brains, [12:01](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDU27f84hAs&t=721s)) - "We did not evolve to be intelligent. We evolved to be or do some other thing and that other thing just happened to make us intelligent." ([14:23](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDU27f84hAs&t=863s)) - "Shared goal, different roles. Shared attention, different perspectives." (Michael Tomasello, [18:23](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDU27f84hAs&t=1103s)) - "Execution selects against the most violent individuals." (Richard Wrangham, [29:47](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDU27f84hAs&t=1787s)) - "You either command the mob or you succumb to it." ([33:36](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDU27f84hAs&t=2016s)) - "The secret of our success, I'll argue, is not our intelligence, but our culture." (Joseph Henrich, [37:09](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDU27f84hAs&t=2229s)) - "It's real, it exists, and it's us." (on the hive mind, [42:47](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDU27f84hAs&t=2567s)) ## Things mentioned **Books** - *Sapiens* by Yuval Noah Harari (Fisher reads its summary of the cognitive revolution) - *The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World* by Max Fisher (2022), named in the description's About section - Related but not named as titles in the video: Henrich's phrase "the secret of our success" is also the title of his book *The Secret of Our Success* (2015); Jared Diamond's east-west axis argument is from *Guns, Germs, and Steel* (1997); Wrangham's execution and "beta male" argument is laid out in his book *The Goodness Paradox* (2019). These attributions come from general reference knowledge, not the video. **Articles and studies** - "The human origin story is being radically revised," *The Atlantic* (Fisher says earlier this year; author not named in the transcript) - A 2025 study on why human brain size evolved, which found brain size to be "an evolutionary byproduct" (authors and journal not named in the transcript) - Lyudmila Trut's long-running fox domestication experiment in Siberia - The Moroccan fossils showing *Homo sapiens* about 300,000 years old (site not named in the transcript) **Films, TV and images** - *2001: A Space Odyssey*; *Frankenstein* (the angry mob); *The Simpsons*; *Starship Troopers*; *Ender's Game* - The "Afghan girl" photograph, called a *Time* cover in the video **Podcasts and channels** - Lex Fridman's podcast (Wrangham clip); Dwarkesh Patel's podcast (Henrich clip) - Newpress; Johnny Harris, Search Party with Sam Ellis, Tunnel Vision with Christophe Haubursin (from the description) **Concepts** - Cognitive revolution, the "tree of knowledge mutation" - Shared intentionality, we-thinking - Self-domestication, neural crest cells, the beta male takeover, the "tyranny of cousins," Machiavellian intelligence - Cultural adaptation, cultural learning, the collective brain, population density as a bottleneck - Cassava processing; wheels on Mayan toys **Sponsor** - Odoo (all-in-one business software; the video features its project app) ## Claims check | Claim | Assessment | |---|---| | A 2025 study found no direct selection for brain size; it is "an evolutionary byproduct" | **Unverified here.** The study is not named in the transcript; Fisher's source doc was not read. Treat as his summary of one modeling study, not a consensus. | | Brains stopped growing about 300,000 years ago and have shrunk by about 10% | **Partly supported, timing disputed.** Some decline in average human brain size is widely reported, but estimates of when it happened vary widely, and some researchers place most of it in the last 10,000–30,000 years or later. General reference knowledge; not re-checked this run. | | The brain uses a quarter of our calories | **Roughly right.** The usual figure is about 20% of resting energy use. | | First fire about 800,000 years ago; first tools about 2.5 million years ago | **Broadly consistent.** Controlled fire is often dated to about 790,000 years ago (Gesher Benot Ya'aqov, Israel); Oldowan tools date to about 2.6 million years ago, though older stone tools (Lomekwi, about 3.3 million years) have been reported. | | Moroccan fossils show *Homo sapiens* 300,000 years ago | **Accurate.** This matches the Jebel Irhoud finds published in 2017 (dated about 315,000 years). The site name is from general reference, not the video. | | Early sapiens reached the Middle East about 100,000 years ago and did not persist; the big expansion came about 70,000 years ago | **Broadly consistent** with the Skhul and Qafzeh record and the common dating of the main dispersal at roughly 50,000–70,000 years ago. | | Lyudmila Trut ran a 40-year fox experiment in Siberia | **Simplified.** The Novosibirsk experiment was started in 1959 by Dmitry Belyaev; Trut was his collaborator and later led it, and it has run for more than 60 years. | | Selecting tame foxes selected for stunted neural crest development | **A hypothesis, not a settled finding.** The neural crest explanation was proposed by Wilkins, Wrangham and Fitch (2014) and is debated. | | Language-related genes appeared about 130,000 years ago | **Unverified.** No study is named; the genetics of language are not well enough understood to date a single origin this precisely. | | Hunter-gatherer societies execute would-be alphas, selecting against violence | **Accurately reflects Wrangham's argument**, which is influential but debated among anthropologists. | | "Tyranny of cousins" is Ernest Gellner's phrase | **Accurate.** Gellner used it for kin-based segmentary societies. | | The "Afghan girl" photo was a *Time* cover | **Inaccurate.** Steve McCurry's photo of Sharbat Gula was the June 1985 *National Geographic* cover. General reference knowledge. | | Wheels existed on Mayan toys | **Broadly accurate** for Mesoamerica: wheeled clay figurines are known, mostly from the Gulf Coast (Veracruz) region rather than strictly Maya sites. | | "The hugging face attack" showed AI agents coordinating under pressure | **Unverified.** Fisher gives no details and no source appears in the transcript. | ## Biographies **Max Fisher** is a journalist who, per the description, has reported from more than 20 countries; was a staff writer at *The Atlantic* and *The Washington Post*, a founding editor of Vox, and a foreign correspondent and columnist for *The New York Times*, where he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist; and wrote *The Chaos Machine*. He now hosts *The Bigger Picture* within Newpress. **Louis Leakey** (1903-1972) was a Kenyan-British archaeologist and paleoanthropologist whose work at Olduvai Gorge helped establish Africa as the cradle of humankind; he named *Homo habilis* with colleagues in 1964. **Yuval Noah Harari** is an Israeli historian and author of *Sapiens*, which popularized the "cognitive revolution" framing. **Michael Tomasello** is an American developmental and comparative psychologist, known for research comparing human children and great apes and for the theory of shared intentionality. **Lyudmila Trut** is a Russian geneticist at the Institute of Cytology and Genetics in Novosibirsk who worked on and later led the silver fox domestication experiment. **Richard Wrangham** is a British primatologist and biological anthropologist at Harvard, known for the cooking hypothesis and the self-domestication theory of human evolution. **Ernest Gellner** (1925-1995) was a British-Czech philosopher and social anthropologist known for work on nationalism and on kinship-based societies. **Niccolò Machiavelli** (1469-1527) was a Florentine diplomat and political writer whose name gave us "Machiavellian." **Joseph Henrich** is an anthropologist at Harvard who studies cultural evolution and coined or popularized the "collective brain" idea. **Jared Diamond** is an American geographer and author known for arguing that Eurasia's size and east-west axis shaped its technological head start. **Lex Fridman** and **Dwarkesh Patel** host the interview podcasts the Wrangham and Henrich clips come from. ## Related - [[Max Fisher]] channel table of contents