The Long Way Back to Ourselves

1.3

The Cognitive Revolution: Language, Gossip, Shared Intention

This episode is about the origins of language, opening with a 75,000-year-old piece of engraved ochre from Blombos Cave whose crosshatched pattern still has no agreed meaning. It corrects the idea of a sudden "cognitive revolution" around 50,000 years ago, citing a 2000 review showing pigment use and blade technology appear far earlier in Africa. You hear Robin Dunbar's theory that language evolved as "grooming at a distance," with the caution that his famous 150-person group ceiling rests on a regression a 2021 reanalysis showed far less precise than claimed. It closes with Svante Pääbo's 2022 Nobel Prize for decoding Denisovan DNA, which settled by measurement a question once argued purely on worldview.