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A second theory agrees that our unique language evolves as a means of sharing information about the world. But the most important information that needed to be conveyed was about humans, not about lions and bison.

Our language evolved as a way of gossiping.

Ryan Somma-Smithsonian Natural History Museum

Homo Sapiens is a primarily social animal. Social cooperation is our key to survival and reproduction. It is not enough for individual men and women to know the whereabouts of lions and bison. It’s much more important for them to know who in their band hates whom, who is sleeping with whom, who is honest, and who is a cheat.

The amount of information that one must obtain and store in order to track the ever-changing relationships of even a few dozen individuals is staggering. (In the book, the author shows us this in mathematical terms. In a band of 50 individuals there are 1225 one on one relationships and countless more complex social combinations) All apes show a keen interest in such social information but they have trouble gossiping effectively. Even Neanderthals and archaic Homo Sapiens probably also had a hard time gossiping behind each other’s backs

According to the Author

“The truly unique feature of our language is not its ability to transmit information about men and lions but to transmit information about things that do not exist at all. As far as we know, only Sapiens can talk about entire kinds of entities that they have never seen, touched, or smelled.”

Legends made in religion appeared for the first time with what the author called cognitive revolution. You can never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death In monkey heaven. But you can convince a human to pay tithe to the church in exchange for eternal happiness in Heaven.

But why is it important? People who go to the forest looking for unicorns would seem to have less chance of survival than people who go looking for mushrooms and deer. If you spend hours praying to non-existing Guardian spirit, Aren’t you wasting precious time, time better spent foraging, fighting, and fornicating?

According to our author, Fiction has enabled us not merely to imagine things, but to do so collectively. We can weave common myths such as the biblical creation story, the Dreamtime myths of Aboriginal Australians, and the nationalist myths of modern states. Such myths give Sapiens the unprecedented ability to cooperate flexibly in large numbers. Ants and bees can also work together in huge numbers, but they do so in a very rigid manner and only with close relatives. Wolves and chimpanzees cooperate far more flexibly than ants but they can do so only with small numbers of other individuals that they know intimately.

“Sapiens can cooperate in extremely flexible ways with countless numbers of strangers. That’s why Sapiens rule the world, whereas ants eat our leftovers and chimps are locked up in zoos and research laboratories.”

According to the Author, gossip helped Homo sapiens to form larger and more stable bands. But even gossip has its limits.

Sociological research has shown that the maximum ‘natural’ size of a group bonded by gossip is about 150 individuals.

Most people can neither intimately know, nor gossip effectively about, more than 150 human beings.

Even today, a critical threshold in human organizations falls somewhere around this magic number. Below this threshold, communities, businesses, social networks, and military units can maintain themselves based mainly on intimate acquaintance and rumour-mongering. There is no need for formal ranks, titles, and law books to keep order. A platoon of thirty soldiers or even a company of a hundred employees can function well on the basis of intimate relations, with a minimum of formal discipline. A well-respected sergeant can become ‘king of the company’ and exercise authority even over commissioned officers. A small family business can survive and flourish without a board of directors, a CEO or an accounting department.

But once the threshold of 150 individuals is crossed, things can no longer work that way. You cannot run a division with thousands of soldiers the same way you run a platoon. Successful family businesses usually face a crisis when they grow larger and hire more personnel. If they cannot reinvent themselves, they go bust.

How did Homo Sapiens cross this critical threshold, eventually founding cities comprising tens of thousands of inhabitants and empires ruling hundreds of millions?

The secret, according to the author, was the appearance of fiction.

Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths.

“Any large-scale human cooperation – whether a modern state, a medieval church, an ancient city or an archaic tribe – is rooted in common myths that exist only in people’s collective imagination.”

In the book, the author gives an example of Two Serbs who have never met but might risk their lives to save one another because of both beliefs in the existence of the Serbian nation, the Serbian homeland, and the Serbian flag. Judicial systems are rooted in common legal myths. Two lawyers who have never met can nevertheless combine efforts to defend a complete stranger because they both believe in the existence of laws, justice, human rights – and the money paid out in fees.

“Sapiens have thus been living in a dual reality. On the one hand, the objective reality of rivers, trees and lions; and on the other hand, the imagined reality of gods, nations and corporations. As time went by, the imagined reality became ever more powerful, so that today the very survival of rivers, trees and lions depends on the grace of imagined entities such as the United States and Google.”

People find it difficult to understand the idea of ‘imagined orders’ because they assume that there are only two types of realities: objective realities and subjective realities.

In objective reality, things exist independently of our beliefs and feelings. Gravity, for example, is an objective reality. It existed long before Newton, and it affects people who don’t believe in it just as much as it affects those who do.