About this episode
The episode explores how popular narratives about the origins of Homo sapiens may misinterpret the evidence due to a bias towards clean storytelling.
Hello Interactors, Neuroscience research on narrative shows that stories sharpen attention, improve recall, and recruit shared brain networks that help us organize events into a coherent arc. The trouble, for anyone who works with spatial data, is that the reality on the ground refuses to cooperate with clean narratives despite this inherent bias. Today I look at how the popular telling of how Homo sapiens came to contemplate such things — to become ‘modern’ — is not the story the evidence keeps telling. THE LURE OF THE LEAP We like our origin stories well defined. The popular telling — the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens is the bestselling version — locates a moment when archaic humans crossed a threshold and became modern, transformed by some neurological windfall in Africa. But a recent paper by anthropologist Huw Groucutt on Homo sapiens dispersal argues this says more about Homo sapiens’ neurological bias toward clean narratives than about the evidence we have. This ‘revolution into modern’ frame has traceable historical roots. In the 1960s and 70s, the only deeply excavated record was in a western sliver of the Eurasian landmass called Europe. There, the…
People in this episode
Host: Brad Weed
Topics covered
- neuroscience
- narrative
- Homo sapiens
- origin stories
- cognition
- cultural evolution
Keywords
- neuroscience
- narrative
- Homo sapiens
- origin stories
- cognition
- cultural evolution
- Huw Groucutt
- Yuval Noah Harari
Mentioned in this episode
Books & works: Sapiens
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