Helen (00:02.264)

When I first started studying psychology with the Open University, way back, many, many years ago, one of the things that struck me most was evolutionary psychology, where we come from as humans and why we behave the way we do. And that naturally led me to working with human beings in the workplace, understanding business psychology, and really looking at it from the perspective of our ancient behaviors. That is why...

I am doing this podcast season. This is why I love this topic so much, but to understand the stories we tell today, the power of the stories we tell today, the context, why they're so powerful, why they really stick, the benefit that they have, we have to go back to our deep past. And I mean our deep, deep, deep past, not just the last 50,000 or so years, not even just the last 10,000 years. I'm talking millions.

of years to the early forms of humans, hominins and all of those different forms of humans and how they evolved, why they evolved and how we eventually learned to communicate through cooperative behaviour, through our gestures and the things that we painted on cave walls and then the anatomical changes that happened for us to develop language and how that led to us telling stories.

in order to survive and carry on our genes. Stories are in our DNA and in this episode, I'm speaking to author Marek Khon. And Marek wrote this amazing book as we know it, and I read this book and was completely fascinated. this episode, we are going back to stories prehistory, but understanding where it all started.

all of those years ago. This is an important and crucial step on the journey to understanding stories in our DNA. So if you're ready, then let's begin.

Helen (00:02.636)

I want to start by taking this wonderful book, as we know it, that you wrote, and starting at chapter four, where you take us to a small group of caves in France, and that there were drawings on those cave walls that were thought to have been around, made around 18 to 16,000 years ago.

how this notion, this extraordinary span of seeing something that extended so far into our human past triggered something inside you about reaching these ancient minds. What was that?

Marek (00:51.362)

Yeah, this was the epiphany and I feel really, really privileged and lucky to have experienced this because...

In that part of the world there are lots and lots of prehistoric sites. Some of them are really, really famous. the most famous one of all is Lascaux, which you can't actually visit. You can only visit a replica, which is worth doing, I must say. it's not all about the cathedral, as Lascaux is sometimes considered to be. The little churches can be just as transporting and just as wonderful.

They all have, like every church has the same basic spiritual content, know. And Cognac, as this place is called, was really, really special because it was so, precisely because it was small and intimate and you could get up close. There wasn't a huge queue, there wasn't a car, you massive car park. You just went down with a guide and at one point the guide would...

turn the torch off so you experience total darkness, which is such a rare thing in this world for people to experience in this world. And you could get up close in a way that you can't at a site such as Peshamil where you get a great view from the built-in walkways. This one was like just being in somebody's, know, the little living room of a cottage, you know, by the fireplace.

And it was a moment where I could stand really, really close to a drawing of an ibex of a horned animal. And it wasn't like this was, hey, this wasn't a fantastic piece of art like the ones that when they were discovered in the 19th century, completely bowled over the both the archaeologists, but the artists of the time because of their extraordinary beauty.

Marek (02:54.988)

an accomplishment. This was just a drawing, you know. And that was actually for me, that was the point. You could see how the person who drew it had used the contours of the rock to create a partly three dimensional shape. So you could see an element of intention, literally another dimension to the work. But the main thing was outstanding.

more or less where that person had stood. And I get this with history as well. Zooming forward to the last century, I became very, very fascinated with the first period in London and the first world war in the 1920s about club life and the underground nightlife of the period. And what that was.

what hooked me on into that was this feeling of, yeah, this is really, really distant. don't know. It's so unfamiliar. And yet it's also really, really familiar. I recognize that. I used to do things like that. I didn't know people like that did that in those days. So it's this constant tension, this constant presence of the very familiar and the very distant.

And that was less than, at that time, was less than 100 years ago. It's a little bit more than that now. So imagine how I felt encountering prehistory, deep prehistory, where we're not talking about the difference between the span of a human life, but the span of more than 500 generations, as I thought at the time. And I'm on the verge of...

of communicating with the mind of a person who lived, well, as I thought at the time, like 16 to 18,000 years ago, the dates have been pushed back even further. It's now like about 30,000 they're claiming. But the point still stands, the reason the point still stands, I think, for me, as somebody who really doesn't do numbers very well, is that

Helen (05:07.211)

Yeah.

Yeah.

Marek (05:22.188)

I don't think many of us can really imagine 10,000 or 20,000. It's kind of the same, know, or 30,000, whatever it happens to be. It's beyond what we can count on our fingers or whatever, and beyond a lifespan, beyond what we can really grasp in our minds. mean, obviously people who can do maths can have remarkable abilities in this respect, but I think...

Probably most of us don't. So there was this.

extraordinary moment of connection and the sense of great separation that were the same and yet we don't really in basic respects but in other respects we have no idea really what was in those minds. I mean people love making theories about you know hunting magic or whatever it is you know fashions change over over time according to the

Helen (06:03.436)

Mm.

Helen (06:14.45)

No.

Marek (06:25.59)

cultural mindset of the period. know, because the past is basically a set of resources for the present to draw on according to its present needs. prehistory is no different. then, yeah, so then I got drawn even further, further, further back to the times before you could come, you could

Helen (06:38.194)

It is.

Marek (06:55.15)

without any uncertainty say these are people just like pretty much like us.

Helen (07:01.676)

And that's why I love this topic. And that's why I studied evolutionary psychology with the Open University when I was working full time in my, whilst I was employed. And it really, was this sense of we are the same, that we're not the same. And this is where my love for story came from. And, you know, in order to understand story, we have to go back into the deep past. We have to understand where our

the early ancestors, the early versions of ourselves, where it all started, even before we could speak. And so this is almost, this is the prehistory of story and we have to go back all that way to this lower Paleolithic period, which spans millions of years up to around 500,000 years ago. And in really understanding how humans evolved with

survival and adaptation, and particularly with the use of stone tools, which is one of the things that you write extensively about in this book, which I found really, really fascinating. So from what we know about this time, and of course, we can only go with things we've gleaned, things we've found, and many things have been found. How did these early stone tools and everyday behaviors help us?

ancestors survive and adapt.

Marek (08:30.488)

Well, we actually don't know much about what else they did besides making stone tools, because of course it's the stone tools that survive. stone tools can survive remarkably, in a remarkably pristine condition, hand axes, are the so-called hand axes, which are the subject of much of my reflections about the evolution of tool use and the human mind.

Helen (08:36.363)

Yeah.

Yeah

Marek (09:00.406)

some of those actually cut the fingers of the archaeologists who excavate them or pick them up off the ground after half a million years. So...

What we know about the abilities of our ancestors, our deep, deep ancestors, I don't really want to call them human because that kind of back projects an awful lot of qualities and begs the question, what is it to be human? So nowadays I've used the term hominin, which is not perhaps the most beautiful word, but...

Helen (09:36.288)

Hmm.

Helen (09:41.164)

Mm.

Marek (09:45.644)

I think it's important to not be super inclusive in a benign spirit of, let's fold all our ancestors into a common humanity. Because if you're talking about evolution, then there's one thing that you absolutely have to continually bear in mind, which is that

population species, all are adapted by natural selection to particular environments. And the point about our deep, deep ancestors is that they probably had different packages of adaptations to the ones that we have. We know that they must have done because they're physically somewhat different. In the early days, they

Helen (10:16.662)

Yeah.

Helen (10:37.354)

Yes.

Marek (10:39.726)

their brains were much, smaller, which must have some sort of significance. They lived in different ways. The conditions of their life were different. So presumably they had their own what you might what's sometimes called adaptive packages. So where do tools come into this? OK. But well, when I wrote the book, it was like about a bit million. Now the claims

more than three million years old, but though you do kind of think there's a bit of a race going on here. It's like whenever a new specimen is discovered, a fossil of a hominin, there's a great temptation to call it a new species, because that way you get your name on it. Yeah, yeah. And the...

Helen (11:11.766)

you

Helen (11:16.897)

Yeah.

Helen (11:32.981)

Of course.

Marek (11:38.894)

the debates within the discipline are in inverse proportion to the amount of evidence, because there are already more people studying with the fossils than there are fossils.

classification is really difficult. Really having a strong sense of the appearance and form of many of these deep, deep ancestors is tricky. But what does emerge is that maybe two plus million years ago, these ancestors learn about the mechanics of napping stone tools.

What that's about is knowing and becoming able to hit two pieces of stone together essentially so that you get a nice sharp flake. And I mean, it's not a skill I've ever mastered. I was just thinking, okay, stop doing this. Otherwise you get a bit of your eye. So take it from me. It's not something that naturally happens.

And this continues for quite a long time, like a million years or maybe two million years, depending if the latest claims of tool antiquity stand up. And this actually makes a lot of sense because they're fine. A flake is great. If you've just got a sharp piece of stone, you can do most of what you probably need to do with it. So you can...

Helen (12:59.552)

Mmm.

Marek (13:24.12)

cut through really thick animal hide, know, like an elephant hide if you managed to get your hands somehow on a dead elephant or managed to make it dead. You can obviously butcher flesh once you've got the hide off. can skin in order to use the skin for clothes. So perhaps that wasn't actually happening at this.

very distant remove in those climates. anyway, certainly comes in handy much later in Europe and Asia. And you can also use it on materials that haven't survived at all. So when it's butchery animals, you can find the evidence for that on bones, which have got...

Helen (14:20.179)

Yes.

Marek (14:20.59)

tell tell tell tell tell come back. So you know that ancient hominids were doing this. What you don't know is what they were doing with plants and bits of wood that have decomposed and longsits. So then something happens around, well, again, these dates keep getting pushed back. The current one is the current.

generally accepted date is about 1.75 million years ago, though there are claims now that pushing back almost to two million years, heaven knows where we're going to go with all this. something happens. Instead of just hitting a stone, getting a sharp edge and using that, distant, distant ancestors discover

a sort of standardized form. And the form is broadly triangular and the distinguishing characteristic of it is that it has two faces. So it's the bi-face. Yeah, so here's one. You can see it's got two faces. This I should immediately do the full disclosure, which is that it isn't

Helen (15:29.546)

The Bye Face.

Marek (15:43.438)

an ancient one. was made in 1996 for me by Phil Harding, if you've the time team on the TV, he's the guy who does this stuff. So this is a more rounded version.

Some of them have distinct points. Some of them have an unsharpened base, so you can hold it at the end. Some of them are big, some of them are small. But the point about them is that despite within that range of variation, they are the only form, the only imposed form that

you find in the archaeological record across Africa, the Middle East, as far as India and in Europe. So really from from South Africa to to Sussex, fact, yeah, absolutely extraordinary. And the interesting thing about this is

Helen (16:51.54)

Yeah.

Marek (17:01.824)

that, well, there are various, people have had endless fun coming up with different theories about this, like, you know, they weren't deliberate, know, they just, people just, sorry, people, there I go. Ancient hominins did, just did rather sort of automatic, unreflective flint mapping and these shapes fell out.

I certainly don't believe that having watched nappers at work and thought about and talked to them about what's involved. doesn't just happen, you learn it. And as Phil Harding said to me, have to see, it's about imagination, it's about visualization. have to see the shape within the stone, which is a really interesting thing. And that capacity of that, like Phil Harding now has the

ability to describe in words because we have language, that capacity must have been there more than a million years ago in our distant ancestors.

Helen (18:09.836)

So what you're saying there is, it's this shape endured over a huge period of time. This was something that didn't change that much. And what we come to understand about that is that it's certainly served a purpose in that it was a very good shape to do all the things that you have said to survive.

to live within an environment, to feed, to clothe, to do all those sorts of things. But there's something else. There's being able to visualize, to envision, to imagine in order to create something like this. To be able to think other than what is in front of you, to think of things in your mind.

to think of stories in your mind, to visualize. And so that had, the theory is that that was present all of those millions of years ago within the mind of our ancient ancestors.

Marek (19:20.31)

Yeah, but we mustn't back protect. Some people, yeah, let's not talk about this as art. Let's not get ahead of ourselves. is part of, no, no, know you're not doing it, but this is me talking to various authors who I've read in the past. And for me, the most extraordinary thing that absolutely held my attention was

Helen (19:23.628)

Okay.

Helen (19:30.238)

Okay. No, no, no, it's good.

Marek (19:49.058)

this lack of change. As I emphasised, not that they don't change at all, they don't vary at all, but that this form should be so enduring, despite what you would sort of expect if you compare it with the evolution of natural forms. These are not large populations of hominins, as far as we can tell. They're very dispersed.

Helen (19:50.91)

Yeah.

Marek (20:17.646)

you would expect something a bit more like what you would see on what you see when you know Darwin's famous finches get washed up and blown onto the Galapagos Islands and each on each island different varieties arise in as they adapt to the particular conditions on that island or you'd lose the skill or

Helen (20:45.484)

Mmm.

Marek (20:48.332)

you just or you just or you develop some different ones. So something to me, felt like the extraordinary thing is that something was holding this technology in place and it is unique and it will be and however long the human lineage lineages lineage manages to survive, it will always be unique because it's it's the only one that was had a monopoly on time.

Helen (21:02.186)

Yeah.

Helen (21:17.003)

Right.

Marek (21:17.262)

on a particular material technology for more than a million years. That'll never happen again because we innovate all the time.

Helen (21:24.736)

Right. So what I'm really fascinated about, which I read about in the book, what this tells us about behaviour.

Marek (21:37.506)

So what I tried to pay, I see it as sort of paying homage to the extraordinaryness of the hand axes. It's called the Acherlian industry. They named after where an early specimen was found at Santa Charle in France. And I, working with cognitive archeologists called Steve Mith and the University of Reading.

came up with an idea about what might've held it in place, which was sexual selection, the form, the ability to do the form became a test of fitness, because these things aren't easy to make. And they...

they can't be made by somebody who's not in good physical condition, eyesight and brain coordination. And it also has, as you've emphasized, the vision, the vision thing, the ability to imagine something. So essentially it makes a good fitness test, but in order to be a good test, it has to be a standard test. So you have to have that model. Obviously it can vary a bit from

Helen (22:48.95)

Yeah.

Marek (22:57.346)

from place to place, from group to group, but you have to be measuring like against like. I mean, this is an extremely, it was always intended as a thought provoking model. It wasn't like, really believe this. was intended to say, look, this phenomenon of the persistence of the Acheolean is so extraordinary that it demands some really bold thinking. And yeah, it had...

It had quite an impact in various ways. But the point I think that underlies our story that we're telling today is about something which in the trade is called costly signaling, reliable signaling. The point about costly signals is

is that they're hard to fake because you need resources. Whether those are material resources like in the modern world, if you've got money to buy expensive clothes and expensive car. In the ancient world, if you've got all those physical and cognitive qualities that I just outlined, it's a hand axe or a luxury car. These are costly symbols.

they're reliable because they're hard to fake and reliability is crucial to language.

Helen (24:28.482)

When

When you say that just for people listening that might not understand what a costly signal means.

Marek (24:38.51)

They take resources. So a classic example of a cross-breed signal that's built in, as it were, an organism is the peacock's tail. a peacock has to... Yeah. It takes a lot of metabolic resources to grow it, to keep it in lovely, lustrous condition. But also it makes life a lot less...

Helen (24:49.537)

Right.

Helen (24:58.858)

grow it.

Marek (25:08.234)

easy than it would be if you didn't have to drag that thing around with you the whole time while you were going about your daily business.

Helen (25:14.54)

but it was advantageous in sexual selection.

Marek (25:19.38)

Exactly. if it led males to succeed in passing on more of their genes to subsequent generations to produce more living offspring, then it was worth having.

Helen (25:35.639)

Yeah. So with that, when we think about this, this, you know, icon of the Bi-Face tool and what that actually represents, it represents fitness, it represents costly signals. It costs to create it, but it is advantageous in its creation. Not only with the physical...

what you can do with it physically, but also what it represents to a potential mate. This person has this homonym, has resources, has fitness, is likely to provide the food that we need to survive, is likely to provide the protection that we need to survive, and so therefore is an attractive mate. And there was also something that you spoke about in terms of at the gene level,

We are destined to be quite selfish in terms of the whole selfish gene notion where it's the survival of the gene that is important and so the survival of the individual. However, with the use of stone tools and hunting, it wasn't just necessarily about the individual hunting and providing meat for the individual's, you know, I guess, mate or closest. It was about the display.

of being able to get the meat, of to share the meat. And so status really comes into play with all of these types of things that again drives sexual selection.

Marek (27:05.986)

Well, in fact, the model, we actually posited that there wasn't a whole lot of sharing at that stage. That this actually works as what's sometimes called a good genes display. So basically, choose a mate, if you're a female, you choose a mate on the basis of the fitness display, but you're not expecting an awful lot from them. And in fact, the way that they, the story that we told, and it

Helen (27:17.59)

Bye.

Marek (27:35.5)

The model could have been done in a different way as was pointed out in the VIVA for my PhD by publication, which has revolved a lot around this. A very distinguished primatologist, Al Herson, Johnny pointed out, yeah, you don't actually need this bit. But the end of our story was that there was a change in

female strategies, female reproductive strategies to use the jargon term, around several hundred thousand years ago, in which because of the increasing demands of raising children, know, the large brained offspring take a lot longer to grow up. You need more resources. Yeah, so you need so females need more resources and

Helen (28:27.532)

born prematurely.

Marek (28:35.308)

So they put pressure on males to actually provide those resources. And that breaks down the monopoly of the hand acts because males are then driven to diversify and their toolkit and produce a whole set of tools which enabled them to do that providing more easily. That's our story. Yeah.

Helen (28:56.118)

Yeah. And Boxgrove featured heavily in your book. And I was really interested in what you spoke about there in this notion of tools being left and what that signifies.

Marek (29:13.718)

Yeah, by the way, this hand axe is quite like the shape that's found at the site at Boxgrove. They're called ovate, in other words, more oval than triangular. Boxgrove, it's in West Sussex. The site is now covered up. was an old quarry and archaeologists had the...

Helen (29:26.548)

Okay.

Marek (29:41.578)

had a go at it in the 90s and they found, think it's about 400 hand axes. think that this is even more so actually at some of the sites in East Africa. Is this phenomenon of hand axes that don't seem to have been used? So what's that about? Why go to all the trouble of making hand axes?

Helen (30:01.704)

Yeah.

Marek (30:10.05)

that which takes quite a lot longer than just knocking a flake off a rock and using that to slice up your meat, which if you're trying to get it to carcass before everybody else does, then it's probably would seem like a good strategy. the answer that we came up with is that it's display, that you're displaying the capacity to

get hold of as much of meat as you need from the butchered horse. That was the showpiece of Boxgrove, the remains of a site where a horse had been killed and butchered. While expending a lot of time and energy on making these showpiece hand axes. So it's conspicuous waste. It's saying, yeah, look, I am so good that I can spend the time doing this and you can admire me.

and you can assess my fitness and I'll still be absolutely fine. This is called the handicap principle and it was applied very liberally by a research called a Elmboxer Harvey. And one of the examples was for example, when a gazelle being chased.

Helen (31:10.796)

Mmm.

Marek (31:35.682)

by a predator will sort of skip around from side to side. It's called starting instead of belting away as fast as they can. And what they're doing there is they're saying, look, you I am so fast. There's really no point in chasing me because I can do this. It's still going to get me. So this seemed to be to be quite a strong sign that something else is going on here.

And yeah, and also there are other examples. The first plaque giant hand axe is that's nearly a third of a meter long or a foot in old money. And it's just, you know, I mean, you'd have to be like three meters high to wield it in the way that you would a small practical hand axe. So that seems again like

Helen (32:04.78)

Mmm.

Marek (32:34.444)

display. know, some of them are decorated, some them seem to be conspicuously aesthetic. again, but ultimately it's this thing of why are so many of them left unused?

Helen (32:35.692)

you

Helen (32:49.036)

Yeah. And I want to bring in a word here, which is really central to this discussion and that's trust.

When we think about behaviour, cooperation and trust and how this featured in our ancestors' lives and why and how important that was. I'd love your sharing on that.

Marek (33:20.642)

Yeah, so hand axes in our model are an example of how hard you have to work to show that you're reliable and genuine without much else to go on.

groups develop and they find ways to communicate more effectively among themselves.

there's a huge advantage to be gained from.

not having to rely on costly signals, but to be able to use low cost signals. What we're using right now is low cost signals. A word doesn't really cost very much for us to produce. And indeed these days in freelance writing, you don't get paid very much for that. That's another story.

key problem with the emergence of language is not that people lie once you have a language system, people are dishonest once you have a language system. It's getting over that capacity for deception and dishonesty when you're trying to create a system of communication. So if it's continually being undermined by people using relatively cheap signals to fake

Marek (34:59.918)

to fake information, then it's never going to get going. So yeah, and again, yeah, I think probably people is about the right term at this stage in the game. We're talking probably several hundred thousand years ago, hominins who are different, but not so different from ourselves in form and certainly in cognitive capacities.

So what do you do? Well, one proposal by radical anthropologists, Chris Knight and Camilla Power, who have a very exotic model about the rituals that were used to establish trust, is that rituals bind a group together because they are costly.

something that's really striking about initiation rituals from societies around the world. They're quite hard to read about in many cases because they involve a lot of physical pain and endurance. But once you have gone through those rituals, you're trusted because you've all been through the same thing together. You're part of the group. You're bonded. You share beliefs.

And this is crucial. This is where it becomes possible to have beliefs that are shared. And once you've got that, once you're able to build that low cost communication system, you can get from a system where all I can do is go, look, there's a wolf over there. We better watch out.

Helen (36:53.28)

And we're talking pre-language here still, right?

Marek (36:56.17)

We're talking about the transition. I mean, you can have a very simple form of communication, which wouldn't be full language where you've got lots of components that you can combine in infinite ways, words and other words. You could have a very, simple language system or rather a that was confined to

immediately verifiable information. So I go, there's the wolf. And if I haven't scared the wolf off by saying there's the wolf, then the others can verify it and we can take the appropriate action.

Helen (37:39.862)

But you could be lying.

Marek (37:41.632)

Yeah, so if I've scared the wolf off, exactly. So. And a lot of the times, probably, you know, the juvenile in the group would be lying for one reason or another. We don't know why we don't know that. We don't know why in the fable, actually, but I've responded to that anyway. Never mind. So you're so the more that happens, the harder it is.

Helen (37:43.436)

The boy who cried wolf.

Marek (38:09.368)

to establish a communication system and to allow language to realize its potential. But once you've done it, you can start to talk about things that don't actually exist because you have shared beliefs. You can imagine gods, you can imagine spirits, and here we go, you can tell stories. No.

Helen (38:31.05)

Yay, we got there. But we're not quite there yet because I think there's a crucial part in this which is approximately around 300,000 years ago or there or thereabouts where an anatomical change takes place within another, I don't want to get this wrong, there's something in particular within the throat. That's it. The larynx.

Marek (38:54.124)

high-ode bone and the larynx. So it's a great debate about whether Neanderthals could speak and so on.

Helen (39:02.164)

Right, because it's costly again, isn't it, to have this, an anatomical change.

Marek (39:05.912)

Yeah.

It is because that anatomical change makes you vulnerable to choking. So whatever's going on, has to be really worth it in other respects to be worth running those risks, particularly with juveniles.

Helen (39:17.717)

Yeah.

Helen (39:27.476)

And that fascinates me because that's what that is suggesting there is that our use of language of commute through communication through language was more important than the risk of choking. So it was a costly signal, right? But it gave such an advantage.

Marek (39:51.224)

Well, it was a costly adaptation, but the benefits outweigh the costs. Yeah, yeah.

Helen (39:52.918)

called the Trosyaga patient.

benefits that way, the cost. And I just want to sort of touch back on this symbolism. And, you know, we're obviously moving really to the upper Paleolithic here in terms of the things that were discovered. Particularly one that I remember seeing years ago was this lion man statue that you actually mentioned in the book. Where was that discovered?

Marek (40:19.104)

no, the lion man, yeah, in Germany. And yeah, I mean, I was so impressed by the lion man. And I'm going to still am, but until I read a paper a few years ago, which said, look, look at it again. It's not a man with the head of a lion. In other words, it's not the...

breakthrough creation of an image of something that doesn't actually exist. It's a bear standing up. And listen, once you've seen it as a bear standing up, no. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, no, it's not just that one. Yeah, that's right. Yeah.

Helen (40:57.886)

I have seen it, I have seen it. But it's not just that, there's other examples, right, of where this imagined, evidence of imagination.

Marek (41:14.006)

Yes, I don't think there's any, I mean, although that may not be quite the example I thought it was at the time. To be fair, everybody else thought that too. But yeah, there does seem to be something that happens kind of around 50,000 years ago where it becomes possible to create imagined images and

Helen (41:27.628)

Yeah.

Marek (41:44.878)

including ones of composite objects that don't exist in nature.

Helen (41:50.957)

Yes, I've seen them on the walls of these caves and marveled at them. You know, in terms of this is, obviously, you know, where the ritual and trust going through ritual and initiation led to a tight-knit group where trust

was possible, shared belief was possible, imagined belief was possible, and gossip happened.

Marek (42:27.928)

But well, yes, and we're, but also.

it's arguably the beginning of storytelling because it's storytelling in pictures. The current winner in the race to be the oldest known piece of representational art is a scene from a fan of Sulawesi in Indonesia, which is dated kind of like around 50,000 years ago. And it's one of those ones where

The experts tell you what it is and you go, okay, if you say so. But what they say is it's three human figures and a pig. a researcher involved with it said, this is the beginning of storytelling. Okay, yeah, that's the kind of story. Because what are stories? They are about arranging items.

or tokens be those visual items or words in a pattern, in a form, a single image, a series of images, cartoons, because we don't know, you know, that maybe there was a sequence of images there telling the story of the pig and the wild wimper. Anyway, the point is that...

Helen (43:54.07)

when we couldn't write things down.

Marek (43:59.854)

the capacity, the idea of the stories does seem to be emerging here. And so the question arises, do, yeah, okay, they're people. What do they want to talk about? Well, I love those studies some time ago of a surviving modern forager group in Southern Africa who were found in the study to spend.

a third of their time complaining about each other. So it's about gossip. It's about talking about other members of the community. this is really, and get to a crucial point here, this aligns with the really powerful idea that the reason that we have ended up with these big brains and why, during the period of hand axes, brains pretty nearly doubled in size.

Helen (44:56.768)

Yeah.

Marek (44:57.71)

is that they were a response to our developing environment, our ancestors' developing environment, which was each other. The crucial driving factor, the environment, was other hominins and is now other people. So they're the ones that individuals are both competing with and cooperating with. And gossip is a very, very, important way of doing, of...

Helen (45:07.082)

Right.

Marek (45:29.396)

working out the tensions between cooperation and competition, or you're creating alliances of the people you're gossiping with and recruiting them in competition with the people you're moaning about or defaming and so on. Great, isn't it?

Helen (45:47.757)

And really, it all comes down to survival, right? For the, you know, the advantages of the individual and the individual within the group. When we developed the ability to use speech, language, well, before that, we told stories on the walls because that was our way of recording patterns to share dangers, lessons.

weather patterns, seasonal patterns, hunting patterns, all of those sorts of things, to this gossip around the dynamics within the group and supporting the dynamics within the group. And then this shared belief, imagined belief of storytelling for a sense of meaning and a sense of belonging and a sense of inclusion within the group for cooperation. So it all leads towards the reason why

stories are in our DNA. The reason why we evolved the way we did and how we did through natural and sexual selection and now why we still tell stories is because it creates the ingredients for survival.

Marek (47:04.011)

Well, that's not so much about survival, but remember, natural selection and sexual selection are more about passing on those genes. Whether you survive yourself is, you I mean, if you're a male praying mantis, it's actually better not to, that's part of the deal. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Helen (47:15.434)

Yes, yes, yes, yes.

Helen (47:22.636)

Surviving in order to pass on your genes, yes. What I'm saying is I guess it still boils down to that, this enriching, fascinating conversation going into our deep past, where this all started for us all those millions of years ago to where we are today follows a similar track.

Marek (47:46.752)

And that process has immensely multiplied our capacity for cooperation. Unfortunately, it's also multiplied our capacities for self-deception and for choosing the stories that we want to believe because they suit our beliefs. But here we are on the internet again.

Helen (48:07.788)

Yes. And I guess to close Marek, thank you so much for your insight here. Two things, guess, know, are your thoughts for the future with regards to our stories? And then also, where can we find out more about you and what might be coming up for you?

Marek (48:32.91)

Thank you. Thank you very much. And can I just say thank you so much for the opportunity. It's been really fun revisiting this and thinking about this whole world and having a reason to go back two and a half or as it turns out more than three million years, which is just great. The deep past is such a great place to be. well, I can see, I now know that you're aware of that. So hopefully we'll share a bit of that with listeners and viewers.

Yeah, where do we go? mean, look, where I don't want us to go is farming our stories out to artificial intelligence. And where I also don't want our stories to go is away from science, which makes up stories. mean, a hypothesis is a scientific hypothesis is a story. But the crucial thing is that you test it. You frame it in such a way that it's testable.

Helen (49:25.416)

It is.

Marek (49:32.27)

And will we lose that or when we treat it as essentially a literary production and say, some of the assumptions behind here clearly affect the social conditions of the ideologies of the people who produced it or the culture that produced it. Yeah, that's true. But the whole thing about science is that it's about going beyond that and cancelling out the effects of those ideologies. So, yeah, let's.

Let's hang on to that.

Helen (50:04.138)

where can people find out more about you?

Marek (50:06.254)

Well, the simplest way is my name or one word marikohn at marikohn.info. You don't need www. my name or one word and it's dot info and there's lots of stuff there and some links to some social stuff.

Helen (50:25.142)

Thank you so much. Really appreciate your time.

Marek (50:28.364)

Well, really appreciated the opportunity once again, so thank you.