Modern Wisdom - #604 - Robin Dunbar - The Evolutionary Story Of Human Friendship

Episode Date: March 20, 2023

Robin Dunbar is an anthropologist, evolutionary psychologist, head of the Social and Evolutionary Neuroscience Research Group at the University of Oxford and an author. Most animals need friends to survive. But no other animal has as layered and complex a social life as humans. The last 2 million years from trees to plains to apartments has caused huge changes to the setup of our social groups, and it's a fascinating story. Expect to learn why any group size over 90 ends up with more people being killed than being born, why men don't have a best friend forever but women do, the link between human brain size and social groups, how male and female friendships differ, why the modern world has the most loneliness ever, what the single largest impact on your health is and much more... Sponsors: Get 10% discount on all Gymshark’s products at https://bit.ly/sharkwisdom (use code: MW10) Get $100 discount on the best water filter on earth from AquaTru at https://bit.ly/drinkwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 20% discount on all Keto Brainz products at https://ketobrainz.com/modernwisdom (use code: MW20) and follow them on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/ketobrainz/ Extra Stuff: Buy The Social Brain - https://amzn.to/41YvOt9  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Robin Dunbar. He's an anthropologist, evolutionary psychologist, head of the social and evolutionary neuroscience research group at the University of Oxford and an author. Most animals need friends to survive, but no other animal has as layered and complex as social life as humans. The last two million years from trees to plains to apartments has caused huge changes to the setup of our social groups and it's a fascinating story. Expect to learn why any group size over 90 ends up with more people being killed than being born, why men don't have a best friend for ever but women do, the link between human brain size and social groups, how male and female

friendships differ, why the modern world has the most loneliness ever, what the single largest impact on your health is, and much more. Dunbar is such a legend, man. I could speak to this guy all day, he's got a beautiful affect to him, this sort of gorgeous British tone, sat there chilling out in his house,

probably drinking a large glass of white wine, as he regales me with stories of human friendships over the last two million years. It's absolutely brilliant, and I really, really hope that you enjoyed this one. If you do, please hit the subscribe button, whether you are listening on Apple podcasts or Spotify or anywhere else, it really does support the show. It makes a massive difference, and it makes me very happy indeed. So take five seconds and go and press it. I thank you. But now ladies and gentlemen please welcome Robin Dunbar. What is the social brain hypothesis for people to aren't familiar with? The social brain hypothesis is really an explanation for why monkeys and eggs have much bigger brains than anybody else in the natural world,

and why we, if you like, as the top end of the monkeys and aches family tree, have exceedingly big brains. And the question is, what do we use these to manage or relatively large, very complicated societies. And it's that that allows us really to hold these things together as a coherent village to borrow an analogy rather than sort of scattered individuals who never talk to each other. Why wouldn't it be the case that we got bigger brains so that we could throw better or so that we could talk in more complex ways or so that we could grow cool hairstyles or do art? Most of those things aren't that computationally demanding. Throwing is probably the most complicated of those. And it's true that we do throw better than

any of the other monkeys and apes, but that's really mainly because we are arms of freed off from because we don't walk on them obviously. Whereas monkeys and apes, arms are used for walking on. But our aiming isn't necessarily better than other species that chuck stuff out like spitting cobras or archa fish that spit out jets of water and knock in sets of branches. They actually probably get more accurate than we are.

Now most of these things, you know, even walking requires some computation by the brain, some calculations, but what seems to be really important for monkey synates is the fact that they live in these very dynamic social environments in which relationships between other people are constantly changing through time. And it's being able to manage those, not just the memory problem, it's being able to manage and predict what's going to happen in these relationships and how to integrate effectively with them within a social system. The big problem you have is if you're too rude to everybody else,

they have a nasty habit of either clubbing you or just walking away and going to live somewhere else with the over-the-shoulder comment that you can look after yourself, feel that clever. So, it's the skills of diplomacy as much as anything else. These are actually very sophisticated and computationally we've shown with neuro-imaging experiments, brain scanning experiments, they're much more demanding in terms of neural recruitment than say ordinary logical thinking in terms of sort of standard causality, a causes b as it were. And I think part of the problem is because what we're having to do with physical things, if I throw my spear in this way, will I get it to end up at that target? Those are things in the real world.

But the social world, what we do is build a kind of mirror world in our minds, people by avatars, which are based obviously on the focus out there. But what we're doing is trying to, in our minds, trying to understand somebody else's mind. And that's where it starts to get complicated. Because if I got to try and figure out what you're thinking about somebody else thinking, who in turn is thinking about somebody else thinking, who in turn is thinking about somebody else elsewhere in order to decide which pub we're going to.

It's not as simple as that. It starts to get notoriously difficult. Get five Democrats in the room and you get five different views. Right. So, computationally, having theory of mind, modeling what other people are thinking is hard, scaling that up beyond yourself and one person or three people or five people or 150 people becomes ever more difficult. So the real simulation hypothesis or the first version of the matrix is us trying to work

out whether or not we're going to, I can convince everyone to go to the pub that I like to go to tomorrow. Right. That's interesting. You said there's a really great quote from your new one, the social brain. Humans have only had to grapple with the stresses and complexities of living in large societies for less than 8,000 years. What is the evolutionary story of human social groups then? Okay, so natural human groups, if you like, the kind of societies we've lived in for heavens, probably the last two million years or so, are the kinds of societies we still find in hunter-gatherers all over the world. So these are what are called fish infusion or dispersed societies where the community doesn't live all in one place. They probably own a better territory, if you like. But the whole community is divided up among a number of much smaller camp groups. The sort of

standard size for these communities is about 150 people, the world over among these kinds of societies, but the size of groups they actually live in, what are sometimes called bands, or the living groups, perhaps a bit more appropriate for a name for them. Typically, somewhere between about 35 and 50, they're almost never big enough 50. Quite a very good reason. That is everybody ends up killing each other basically. Why? On his side rates go through the roof. Why would that be the case?

It's just, well, the reason is simply, the reason that humans live in these dispersed societies in the first place, and it's the reason why primate societies are as small as they actually are if you put it in those terms. It's simply the stresses of living in close proximity, and this is not just our problem, it's not a monkey in eight problems, it's a mammal-wide problem. Now these stresses come in two ways. The indirect version is that given that you're trying to get everybody to the same pub for lunch

when you leave the sleeping tree, did it difficulty for any mammal is that as they're foraging on their way, and especially back to the chosen sleeping trees to spend the night in, what tends to happen is animals just get dispersed as it were over a big area and eventually they they kind of the groups fragments and almost go off on their own. This is what you see right going on right for your eyes in in herding species like deer and antelope and so on. They break the groups break up very quickly. They're coming together when they need to come together usually as protection against predators. If a predator hoves interview in the distance, everybody saw the clumps, tries to find the nearest other folk to gather together with.

Birds do the same, and see them on shore birds very nicely, but as they forage, they kind of drift apart, and especially if the activity schedules get out of synchrony, which is a perennial problem if some animals are bigger than others. So species that have dimorphic body sizes, so females are much smaller than males. The females have to go to rest because they've filled their stomachs long before the males do.

So the males typically in these museums and going on and deer and antelope and the like, you know, the males will carry on feeding when the females have all gone to rest. And so the groups naturally fragment, that's a perennial problem for all of them. And if, well, your choice is that, you know, sort of, you can form casual groups or herds and that solves your problem but the risk you run with that is that your court on your own the one occasion in the months when a predator turns up at which point you are lunch. Basically predators don't like attacking groups. That's why this grouping strategy is so common among birds and mammals in general.

So the advantage of the sort of herding strategy is it's pretty costless in terms of cognition. You don't need a big brain to do it because individual relationships are basically anonymous. All you have to know is, you know, am I going to, you know, if I get into 50, 50 cuffs with this big thug, am I going to lose or not? I'm going to lose. Don't do it. Stay away. Keep away from them. That's all you need to do. So the only permanent kind of relationships you have are between females and their offspring and of course they don't last forever because once the offspring are adults they effectively become anonymous members of the herd and go their own way. So the alternative way is to do it, the way species like the primates as a collective, but also some other

mammals, mostly species, poor groups, the horse family, the elephant, the dolphins, the camels, especially the South American camelids. They form permanent stable groups, multi-generational stable groups that don't on the whole lose individuals particularly easily, usually because it's quite difficult to go and join another group. The only way they can become smaller is by breaking up into two, which is what they do. But to have these stable groups is very cognitively demanding because you need to be able to exercise the skills of diplomacy and that seems to be cognitively very expensive and that's why you need a big brain. But there is another cost now that kicks into place which is

actually what drives this tendency for mammals in general not to live socially. And that is the stresses incurred from bumping up against folks. So this is, you know, the sort of Los Angeles freeway problem, you're just crammed by cars. Well alternatively you might say the New York subway at Russia, a problem where you're just sort of hemmed in by people, constantly bumping up against you, not necessarily maliciously or intentionally, it is just that it is crowded space and inevitably people just kind of bump into each other and so on. And those kind of stresses have a terrible effect on female reproductive endocrinology. So they basically shut down the menstrual system.

And they do it very fast if the frequency arises. Frequency of these kind of stresses gets up to a certain level. It will completely shut the whole system down. This effect is so strong in basal mammals, sort of generic, not terribly social, not permanent group living mammals, but you know, they might live in small groups. That it's actually sets an upper limit on the number of females that can live together, it's about five. And as far

as primates are concerned, that means you can't have a group with more than about 15 individuals in it. Female is always about a third of the total group in primates. So this would naturally, and at that point, you're only just breaking even as a female in terms of your reproductive output to replace yourself. That's kind of the best you can do under the circumstances if you need to live in groups. Ideally, you're much better off living on your own as a single female. I mean, you don't have as many males there apparently as you like. Because what creates the stress seems to be whatever females are doing to each other. Didn't quite tell me. Didn't you tell me that concealed ovulation in humans

could be explained by the fact that it stops other women introsectually competing with them by stressing them around the time of their ovulation so that it could cause exactly this disruption and maybe mean that they couldn't have kids during that cycle. This is one of the possible explanations, yes, for concealed ovulation. The other is it encourages male competition for you because they don't quite know whether they've fertilized you or not. So if you have a free-for-all kind

of mating marketers, you have in many mammal species. So it encourages the males to stay around and that then gives the female a more choice. Presumably also protects the infants as well. Not necessarily, no. I mean, what actually, primarily the problem that most mammals face, the most birds as well, is actually predation risk or what comes to the same thing, but probably not quite so widespread is ecological competitors. In other words, the folks in the next door valley, the next group as it were, intruding onto your feeding territory. But predominantly, it seems to be predation-risk.

And for that, it is group size. So if you look at what affects female fertility in these groups, it increases with the size of the group, which is what we'd expect. The group is providing the protection. So the bigger the group, the higher fertility is getting because the females are being buffered against the external stresses. But at the same time, the more females

there are in the group, the worse their fertility is going to be. So you end up with these hump shaped fertility curves when you plot fertility against group size or against a number of females in the group. Turns out the number of males in the group contrary to what I spent 40 years trying to study, ironically, the number of males in the group has absolutely zero effect. I'm not sure if that's entirely true right the way through, but in general they don't have an effect. There seems to be a tendency, some species for females to exploit males as hired guns, basically,

as protection. So you see this in gorillas, at some extent you see it in species like geladron, possibly hemodrystic moons. have a dryest of wounds. But predominantly, their males are just kind of, as we believe to be the case in primatology since the 1960s, early 70s, is the males are just free-wheeling, operating around a honey pot. If females gather in a group, the males will map onto them, you know, otherwise they just kind of go wondering. But the, the, those effects, the mating effects that you see, then really a spin-off of whatever the social structure or social organization actually is, and that depends on how many females they're on the group. But we run into this problem whereby the more females there are, the more they destabilise

each other's menstrual endocrinology and risk ending up in fertile. You even see this in humans. So polygamous households are generally less fertile than monogamous households within a given culture. That's interesting. So it seems like females have this balance that they need to strike between the amount of protection and all resources that perhaps a partner or a group could give them, with how many other females does being a part of that group expose me to. And if you have too few resources or protection, you are at risk of predators, but if you have so many resources and protection that other women have gravitated toward that group, you are then suffering this endocrinology fuckery that goes on.

Yes. So, and this is the trade-off, essentially. It's the trade-off between survival in the face of particularly predation risks. So, you know, are you going to bake it through to adulthood and, you know, once you get to adulthood, are you going to be able to hang around long enough to reproduce yourself? On the one hand, and on the other hand, the fertility direct fertility costs that seem to arise

from these stresses. And I'm not hasten to say this is not, in this particular case, the females going out and beating each other up necessarily. This is just the fact that they are clustered, if you like, they're kind of clustered together in the center of the social world. Therefore, they're bumping up against each other much more. This does spill over in terms of human hunter-gatherers,

though, because it turns out that homicide rates, so the proportion of all deaths that are due to homicide, just increases linearly with the size of the living group in contemporary hunter-gatherers. To the point where a group of 50 is the sort of standard living group size, camp group size, something in the order of 50% of all deaths are due to homicide and these are not warring. The consequences of fighting with the enablers. A lot of this is internal fighting. Most of it, of course, is in a consequence of badly behaved males and a fair share of the victims of women, but not exclusively so as North of a lot of males get covered in the process.

And this seems to be simply a consequence of the rising stress levels spilling out into, as the tip of the iceberg, as it were, into outright violence that ends up very easily in humans with, because of our weapons, as they were, It was with the one party or the other being killed. At 50% of mortality due to homicide, this is not very good news because the group's ability to produce offspring to replace itself. And if you go much above that, I suspect you are very quickly into demographic, negative territory. In other words, the group is shrinking rather than growing. Well, I think what probably happens is it oscillates around what seems to happen in primates is when they hit this upper limit of fertility, effect, what we call the infertility trap, What happens is the group oscillates around a sort of average value because it sort of

starts to, because it's not reproducing because it's too big, it loses members through death and then that brings the group size down below the threshold. So fertility kicks up again and the group starts to build up and it just keeps doing this until eventually it'll partition into two and you get efficiently. See that going on in primates all the time. It seems to happen in human groups as well, though whether that's the same cause, underpinning it, is not clear, but you see the same pattern in small scale human groups. The problem for hunter gatherer simply is that you cannot have 150 members of the community, the wider community, living in the same place at the same time, because you would end up,

by the time you get to about 90 people, 100% of all your deaths would be due to homicide. At that point, you're probably already gone extinct. Wow. Very, very serious. How it would be? No, the surprise, if you like, is because we've always assumed that the reason hunter-gatherers live in these dispersed societies is for ecological reasons. It's a tough old life out there. You can't walk down to the nearest supermarket and pick some stuff off the shelf.

You've got to go around shooting animals, trapping ducks, digging up some roots here and it's hard work. But the answer seems to be, actually, maybe not. The problem is, just the stresses and tensions have driven them apart, but they want to keep that community within balance so that, you know, on the odd occasion, when some serious predation event occurs or, you know, or you're rated by some community from some tribe from elsewhere, you can get hold of them quickly enough to band together in what's effectively a kind of herd. And of course, that extends out through the community up to the level of the tribe, just sort of usually somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 people, we've destroyed it in a much wider area.

But this flexibility seems to allow them to cope both with the kind of survival consequences of living in the natural world on the one hand, but also managing the fertility problem. Now, in general, the way primates handle the fertility problem is what the females do is form alliances with each other. So, form these grooming clusters of two or three animals, certainly, which just buffer them enough to defer the fertility, the negative fertility effect. That still kicks in eventually, but it sort of differsed enough to allow them to live in

bigger groups. So you see, you look at how primates, their societies work. The species that live in ever bigger groups seem to have broken through glass ceilings, and there seem to be about three glass ceilings they push through at each step they're introducing some new capacity in some way which allows them to hold down, well both to keep the group coordinated and stop it disappearing and over the horizon on half the group does it being over the horizon on the one hand, but also manages the stresses and conflicts within the group at the same time. And depending on how big the group is, they seem to manage that in different ways.

And the species that live in very big groups, by very big groups, we mean on average, only groups of about 50, which are what you see in gym and z communities and a boom, a cap type, so the smart social planet. What they exploit is these very high level cognitive skills, which are extremely expensive computationally, so they require a lot of neural processing. These are things like mentalizing, the ability to inhibit pre-poken responses, which is basically not to let the red mist rise when somebody, so there's two issues here, as I like to put it, you know, that in the sand pit of life,

this is how you work at kindergarten, you know, you're all in the sand pit playing together and somebody walks past you and kicks sand in your eyes. Now the question is, did they do it deliberately or was it an accident? It makes a big difference how you respond. If they did it as an accident, what you need to be able to do is to say, it was an accident. I'm not going to, you know, clobber them or kick Sam back in their face Because it wasn't intended if they did it deliberately then you have a second step which is okay, you know Do I do I behave as the San Pit bully and beat them up for kicking Sam in my face or

do I talk to them nicely and try and talk them round and use the skills of diplomacy to avoid upsetting the stability of the social environment so if you know if you exert violence in response to somebody else annoying you then that tends to destabilize the level of equanimity in the in the group at the community as a whole so it tends to destabilize the level of equanimity in the group at the community as a whole. So it tends to cause people to want to leave.

So if you wanna keep them together and you have to exercise these skills and play the same thing. And these are very cognitively demonic. They require this business, this capacity to inhibit the red mist when it rises and go, hang on, no, no, calm down, calm down, take easy. That requires in turn, mentalising about it, because you have to be able to figure out what were they trying to do, were they trying to annoy me, or was it all nax and all what?

How many times have they done this before? Did I see them do it to my friends yesterday? Yes. One of the things, then what becomes very important in primate is a whole bunch of kind of high level, but not quite so high levels, the other two cognition skills, which are generally wrapped in as a general thing known as executive function skills. So these are causal reasoning, analogical reasoning, things like that. And one thing that primates do, which nobody else can do, it's unique to the anthropoid primates and depends principally on a bit of the brain that doesn't exist

in anybody else's brain, is one trial learning. They're extremely good at inferring rules, general rules, from one observation. Because everybody else is doing association learning which means they've got to see it happen lots and lots of times and then they go oh yeah that's that's happened 15 times after the last 20 occasions yeah but because they have the capacity for more mental processing they are able to extrapolate out from a single event more effectively. Okay, so the thing that I'm finding interesting here, we've got this, you know, two million years ago,

up until 8,000 years ago, period. We then have this evolutionary mismatch come and smash us in the face. How is it the case? Given all of the things that you've just said, the homicides rates, the fertility, messerie, all of that. How, first off, how do we get into agrarian society?

And then secondly, how is someone living in an eight million person city like New York? Yep. Yep. With difficulty, is the answer. Ha, ha, ha, okay. Okay. The answer to the first one is what you see

in the archaeological record. Around 8,000 years ago, the beginning of the Holocene, so after the last ice age, people started living in villages. Up to then, they lived in these dispersed communities. From about 8,000 years ago, they initially start living in villages that are community sites, so they're about sort of 1 to 200 people. So it looks like the three bands that make up a community, hunter gather community, have locked together

and lived in one space. And there's very, very quickly grow in size, going through town sizes of maybe a thousand people up through sort of small cities, classic near-Lithic cities of perhaps five thousand people in a de Jericho's in the soul of life, and then of course, you know, beyond that they very quickly become kings, kingdoms and nation-states and where we are now. There's two questions here. One is, why did that happen? Secondly, why did it happen where it did?

Because actually it happened across a band, a latitudinal band, right the way across the world at the same time. And secondly, how on earth did they do it? In other words, how on earth did they avoid killing each other, just to be blunt? The answer to the first question is very interesting because it turns out that, well, historical sociologists have thought for a long time, this is a consequence of raiding primarily by the focus in the next or value, so it works. The question is why would raiding happen at that point? The answer seems to be the

population just exploded after the ice age. And the reason they it exploded, or let me put it this way, what in retrospect we kind of realize now is that it only exploded in this very narrow letter to the general bound, what's known as the subtropical zone, which is a very narrow 12 degrees of latitude zone that lies above the tropics, immediately above the tropics, and buffers the temperate zones in the northern and southern hemisphere. In Europe and Asia and in America, most of those lie in the temperate zone, but separating the tropics proper from the temperate zone,, very narrow band called sub-dropical zone. That turns out the sub-dropical zone has very interesting properties because of the way in which the growing season and

pathogen densities correlate with latitude. Turns out to be in a kind of magic space where pathogen densities which decline, pathogen densities are very high at the equator. Let's see, it was famously described in terms of where is it good to grow cocoa, West Africa, why? Because it's hot, sweet and sloppy. That was the classic definition of good grain conditions. That's perfect conditions for pathogens. So the kind of, the closer you get to the equator, the higher the pathogen loads. You get the pathogen loads die away rather fast. The further north and south you go from the equator. By the time you get to the top of the tropics and the north

inside at least, pathogen densities are about as low as they are further north in Europe and Asia. But growing season is still quite long, so you haven't got into the temperate zone where you start to have proper winter. So you've got lots of growing conditions are perfect. And at that time, after the last retreat of the last ice age, that temperate zone across the old world, in particular, was absolutely rich. I mean, the Sahara was lush and green with big rivers

and lakes in the middle of it, and hippopotamus is and crocodiles having fun together and fishes and baboons and all sorts of stuff which now don't live anything closer than about a thousand miles to further to the south because what happens so you have at this particular point I have this sudden burst of richness population has just explode and suddenly you've got a lot of people competing for space and resources and when that happens the easiest way to get hold of any kind of resources is basically to steal it off your neighbor's. So the

response was to try and live in groups. Now they have then to solve the stress problem. But what's interesting is, just to try to talk about that, particularly, what happened around four and a half thousand, four thousand, two hundred years ago, there was a massive climate change event. And the Sahara dried up as did, so you've got all the sort of Rajasthan deserts in India and so on and so forth, right away, around the globe, basically, in these sub-tropical zones. And things got very nasty as a result of that, because there was a lot of political turmoil that happened.

But that encouraged them to kind of live bigger, bigger cities, I guess. But the big problem, I think at this point, we've always seen again the near-lithic as all the time we invented agriculture, and obviously that's why we lived in villages, so we could all sort of work on the land together. And the answer is, well, actually nobody ever does that, you know, show me a culture anywhere around the world where everybody in the village cooperates to dig a patch. They all have their own patches.

It's not until you get into commercial scale farming to feed empires, and then roam, etc., etc., and burgeoning populations in Europe and the medieval times, that you start to get commercial side plantations where you have lots of people working together or employed to work together on farms. Prior to that, and everywhere else in the world, even now, sort of, peasant farming is done by the family. That's it. You don't necessarily need a big family.

You can. And what's more, it's become clear from the archaeology that growing cereals was actually invented before people started living in villages. It predates the first settle experience about a thousand years. Obviously it's not very easy to have big farms if you have a nomadic way of life, but still it's possible to have some kind of temporary farming sort of, if a seems to be what they're doing. Now, the big problem they had was literally to how to avoid killing each other. And I think what they did was introduce a whole, in fact, we can show this with living,

the transition between living hunter-gatherers and living auticulturist, living in slightly bigger groups of 100 to 200 people. They introduce social institutions, which allow them to manage as a community, manage the stresses and particularly manage the kind of violence that tends to erupt among young males. So the kinds of things you can see and these are brought in sequentially as they hit glass ceilings in terms of community size. Things like men's clubs where they can kind of sit down. The classic one which, highway side,

because I think it's just such a lovely example, is what the American planes Indians dance and people like the Black Whartons saw. Normally they lived dispersed hands together as life in small groups of 50 to 70. Then once a year they gathered together for the Buffalo hub. They got a thousand people crammed together and all their TPs, all those classic photographs of the 19th century. What they did was have a whole lot of institutions which allowed them to manage stresses, particularly any outbreak of violence within the community, one of which was to introduce a police force that they would take all the young men from one or the men of fighting age, if you like, from one hunter gatherer band and say, okay, this

year you're the police force. You know, your response for going around and knocking a few heads together when necessary. But the other thing they did when there was a bit of a brawl broke out perhaps between two idiots is they would take them, they'd have a special TP, the PSDB, they would sit them down the PSDB, make them smoke a peace pipe together, and all the other men are sitting around the outside edge of the TP and make them talk to each other and sort out their problems in front of everybody else and then everybody comes out of it.

That's like a, a, a, a, near-lithic version of Jerry Springer or, or counseling or, an intervention of some kind. You have the talking rock, hold the talking rock. Now it's my turn to have the talking rock. Yeah. Yeah, so so those kind of things. So those men's clubs, you see them all over the place in these kinds of societies sort of post-tun together societies. You don't see them in hunter-gatherer societies. At least we've never found an example of a Coke one. So just to interject, Robyn. So what you're suggesting is that as the group sizes began to scale up, the only way that you could restrict this over 90 people, 100% of homicides, 100% of death being due to homicide, is through rudimentary social institutions, kind of legislation, early legislation, cultural technology is probably more shame and guilt and

accusation and stuff like that. Yeah, it's pre-legislation. There's not a lot of kind of formal legislation, otherwise there's no judicial system. They tend to appear later. kind of formal legislation, otherwise there's no judicial system. They tend to appear later. They do come in, but they come in at much bigger group sizes. What you get in this black hole period space, somewhere between living group sizes of 50 and living group sizes of about 400 is the series of things. in addition to things like men's club, you get charismatic leaders. So these are people who have authority and power by virtue of their acknowledged skills.

Maybe it's a hunter, maybe possibly a sauerkra, maybe a prestige goes on. As because they're wise. And they're perceived as producing the wisdom of Solomon, whenever there's a kind of dispute. And then on top of that, there's things like feasting, both feasting within the community itself, but feasting with neighboring communities in sort of big,

once in a while, events, which build linkages across, and then also what you see is things like marriage or marital arrangements. So you have marital obligations, which particularly young men have to do, have to live and work for the bride's family for so long, or the fact when the couple get married, after they can live with the bride's family for a year or something, those kind of things, these kind of obligations. I think what they're doing is creating, actually doing two things, one is they're expanding the pool of potential mates,

which is what usually keeps young males contented. You get problems in all societies when there's a shortage of women, basically. And so if you expand the pool, if you're a very small group, the chance is that everybody, every baby born one year were male, by pure chance, quite high. So you end up with a bunch of guys with no prospect for marriage. That is an unhappy mix. So if you expand the size of the grouping to include the next door community,

then you increase the possibility of everybody finding a partner. But also, cunningly, what you do is you produce another bunch of people who have a vested interest in your marriage working, who can also be pressure on you to behave better. So, all these kind of interesting little checks on the earth, that seems to get you through in a series of steps, almost like glass ceilings, where new things are added into the mix. Up to about 400, 400 what's interesting is judicial systems start kicking in. You start to have formal laws, judges, you know police forces

and you have doctrinal religions. And what's doctrinal religions are interesting for basically is two things. One is some sort of moral high god wagging his maybe her thinker, the case may be, in the spirit world as well whenever you disobey or whenever the mere mortals disobey and do things badly. This is not quite the same sense of moral high gods you get in the what sometimes called the Axial Age religions which appear sort of around about three thousand years ago. Also, which are often monotheistic. These are much more like tribal gods, but they're imposing a discipline from above, making people stick to the kind of generic codes of good behavior as much as anything. But at the same time, what religion does through

its rituals is create this sense of commitment and belonging, which so you've got to top up top down and a bottom-up effect going on. You've got this and bottom-up effects in this context are always better as we know well. You know you can have the most draconian police force in the world and the most you know draconian judges and the most draconian penalties for breaking the law, but we still break the speak, because the chances of being caught are, you know, modestly thin, so you've got a good chance of getting away with it and you know, you can make those kind of penalties for everyday laws like that, as draconian people will just ignore them and get on with it and do what they intend to do.

If you have that built into a kind of moral code which is sanctioned by a god or gods in some form, it puts it in a different plane. Are you saying if a higher power is watching my speedometer? Yes. in a different plane. You're saying if a higher power is watching my speedometer? Yes, the thing is, you know, when you're driving down Route 66 in your old Jolope, nobody can see what you're doing out there in the desert. Except for him. But there is somebody who's watching you. Somebody's watching your speedometer. So, okay, I mean, this is fascinating. The fact that we have this, kind of a little bit like an arms race between the externalities that come from group size and the technologies

that then need to be developed. It's almost like that predator prey ecology thing that you would see throughout evolution. I'm still struggling to understand why these bigger groups came together at all. If what you're saying is that individual families were the ones that were farming, at this stage, I don't know why they have decided to pull together into 400 and 1,000 person groups. This is almost always to do with protection from raiding. The farming bit is simply the way of provisioning. If you've got 500 people, 1,000 people living together, you very quickly exhaust the natural resources of the kind used by hunter-gatherers in your immediate area.

So if you're going to feed yourself in the way we've always done us hunter-gatherers, it means you're just being pushed to go further and further and further out. At some point it just becomes impossible in the whole system or collapse and starvation in effect. Farming solved that for us. It allowed us to live in villages because we could kind of do all that food production close by. Without having to drive the cycle along. Yeah, I mean, in the end, of course, you know, you exhaust the land if you overuse it, but that takes a lot of motivation and cycling of crops and so on and so forth. Well, those clever things can come in to mitigate that a bit, but there's nothing you can do.

If you go killing Antelope and cutting down fruit trees for firewood and all that sort of thing that we insist on doing, in a way a hunter gatherer might, you very quickly empty the land around you and that the sort of circle experience further and further out, whereas obviously you can grow food like cereals and the like on relatively small pieces of land and you can keep doing it year after year on the same bit of land. Eventually you might have to lift the entire village and move somewhere else, but that's a thousand years down the road. You know, we can let somebody else worry about that. The next generation can deal with it. You know, farming works fine, you know, for a generation with rarely causes many problems in that sense. When you start a new

clear new land and start farming. So the agriculture bit, which isn't very complicated at the end of the day. And as I say, the archaeologist now agree, I think, that people started doing simple agriculture well before they started living in villages. But it's an easy solution to the food problem. I think the real big problem they struggled with was how to keep the lid on the stresses of having people in compact areas. And it really looks like you had this explosion in population.

And this is why only happened in this zone. It didn't happen anywhere else because the population sizes, or these are the conditions for population growth, weren't anything like as bounteous as they were in the north and sub-tropical zone. It didn't happen in the southern sub-tropical zone partly because there isn't so much land down there and also partly because the land is much more desert-like, right the way around the world, because the rainshadow of the Andes on the Argentinian

plains there and so on, and the South African high-vehlt. These areas have always probably been like I know sort of grass-land, basically, and not very productive. So you never seem to have had this transition from hunter-gathering into agriculture and settlements down there that you had in the north, and it is still the case that all the folk who lived down there historically and sort of still some extent survived down there, predominantly or at least until very recent historical times

Raw hunter-gatherers and there were there were no Serious settlements until till let's say 500 years ago something like that When essentially agriculture was brought down from from the rules and hemisphere so structure was brought down from the Northern hemisphere. So you have these rather peculiar and special conditions in the Northern sub-tropical zone which sort of kicked off this population explosion. Triggered is sort of retreating to defensible positions. This is why a lot of these places have built on natural hilltops and the like, think of the Iron Age forts in Europe and North and Europe. But you see this response all the time, historically, and this is a well documented response. We look

at the American Indian populations in the southwest in their response both to each other as you had the kind of Nardene speaking people was coming down intruding down into the area of these these original tribes but also the Spanish later coming up from Mexico. Their response was always when things get tough. They retreated from their nice rich riverside villages and went off onto the top of Mezas, which were much more defendable. And you see exactly the same thing happening west Africa in the 18th and 19th centuries in response to slaving by Arab and African slaving expeditions which were fueling the transatlantic trade, the the the target populations would retreat from their nice flat valley bottoms up into the hills because it just made it much more difficult for for raiding parties, particularly horse-born raiding parties, to move around up there

much more defensible, you see it in the 19th century, early 19th century in in Zambia where a lot of the Chewa for for example, who spread out into Malawi in response to slave raiding by the Zuni in peace coming up from from further south and in South Africa in around the Tal and places. around the Tal and places, the Zulu raiding passes after the big Zulu civil war in the 1830s, they were forced to retreat, or they opted to retreat again up into the mountains from their nice valley bottoms. And it was only once slavery and these slaving expeditions in these particular cases were stopped as a result of the European colonization of these interior places. People went back down again, you know, once the threat had been removed, they kind of went

weep, it's a big rim up here in the clouds and back down they go. So this is a kind of natural response by humans really to clump together and find defendable positions delivered. Why two questions. First one, how did women mitigate the messing up of their fertility cycle? Given that they're now, when I'm talking about 400,000 person groups living together. Is it simply that when you have a house, and there's a little bit of land in between you and the people around you that you manage to buffer

that impact? And then secondly, is it simply a case of continuing to scale what you've suggested there, which is, you increase the group size, you increase some cultural technologies and some social institutions to deal with it. Is it a straight line from 400 people in the Neolithic period to Manhattan in 2023? Basically, I think so. My view has come round to be all this stuff can be explained basically as a consequence of demography and the stresses of demography. The cost and the benefits introduced by demography essentially. The issue of female

fertility in these contexts is very interesting as to how they have managed it. I think a lot of it has been the imposition of external control, if you like, at a societal level. So, you know, there are laws, sort of, you know, sort of 10 commandments, certainly you can't do this, and you can't do that in different forms combined with the imposition of some sort of judicial system, so the sort of miscreants can be Julie punished and this helps to, you know, people do occasionally learn if they're punished, it's very better, but also there's a sense in which it is an example that pull a Zoltra for the others. Don't do this because you're just getting into trouble. So all those kind of things help in their little bit.

I think that clearly makes it possible for people to live in big groups. And it's clear that when political control, judicial control, whatever you want to call it, is lost as in times of civil war. The whole thing just falls apart and collapses very, very quickly. Mayhem and just have to look at Ukraine. just having to look at Ukraine. People just behave incredibly badly, whenever they have the free hand. So, but that's the sort of big scale. I think there was still a lot of things going on

underneath the surface, which played a very strong role at the women's level in particular. One of them, and this is, I'm sure, very, very ancient, is this tendency for women to have a best friend forever a BFF. There's a kind of foreign territory for bloats, right? You don't really find them in bloats. I mean, if you ask a bloat, do you have a best friend?

They'll go, yeah, Jimmy, you know, I have a point of beer with Jimmy, every Friday night or something down the path we meet up. And I've known him since we were a primary school. They tend to be actually very long-lasting, those kind of friends and men's friends, much longer-lasting than women's best friends forever, paradoxically.

But they're very, very few and far between and they're very substitutable because if Jimmy decides to go off to Thailand for the rest of his life, you know, Chris just shrugs his shoulder and goes, oh, it's great, we had a great time, but you know, Pete will do. And if he just substitutes Jimmy with Pete. Okay.

And everything is exactly as way it was before. That doesn't happen with women's best friends forever. And this is a reflection of that, that women, if you look at all the literature on friendship and all the work we do on friendship, women have these very focused, personalized friendships, culminating in the best friend forever for knowledge. Very, very tight.

What we used to call platonic friendships because they're rather like romantic relationships and they're intensity but they don't have the sexual element to them. Those kind of friendships, however, they are brittle, like romantic relationships. They're built on trust and you can tolerate a lot of small breakdowns of trust. You forgive them, you forgive them, you've had enough and everything terminates catastrophically and you never speak to each other again. Does the amount of intensity cause a degree of pressure that's sometimes difficult to keep up with? That's possible, but I think these relationships are hugely supporting, as it were, in providing kind of both in keeping the pressure, because the way these grooming coalitions work in monkeys and apes. You know, is they're not kind of attacking alliances

in which, you know, it does happen from time to time, but by and large, you know, it's not built around your friends sort of leaping in with their swords and shield flying everywhere because you've got attacked by somebody else. The way it works is passive defensive. It just keeps everybody off your back and reduces the pressure from you, even within a large social group. So that seems to be in effect what these best friends forever are doing. And of course, they're providing lots of things like emotional

support and support during childbirth and in particular the long rearing period that humans have. I would guess protection from gossip, retributive gossip against gossipers that are pointing stuff in your direction. Yes, that's right. I mean, these are all things that just allow you to dampen down these kind of things. It's not about excluding solving the problem completely. It's just about getting the pressure down low enough that it doesn't rub off too heavily on you

and trigger any of these kind of infertility effects. What I was described the difference between men and women's friendships is for a woman, it matters who you are not what you are, for bloats. The first question bloats usually ask each other, is what do you right? For blokes, the first question blokes usually ask each other is what do you do? And the question is because it matters what you are not who you are, who you are is completely substitute for. What you're looking at is a club and you see this on Facebook. If there's two people in the photograph, the profile photograph, that in the profile photograph, that's the profile photograph,

what you'll see is, if it's a girl's page, it's either, if it doesn't me and my mum or me and my baby, if they're the same age, it's my romantic partner, or it's my best friend forever. And typically they won't have many, it's very rare for them to have more than two people

in the photograph they have any at all, other than themselves. If there's three, four or five people in the photograph, it is always the bloke's page. And they're always activity based, it's five bloke sitting in the five aside football goal mouth. Sorry, soccer goal mouth from the amateur Saturday evening, Friday evening games, games we play, or it's five of us sitting on top of the mountain at Matju Pitu, you know, or it's five of us in Okanoes on on on on on late superior or whatever it

says you do it's always activity base so the definition of a club is very casual right it can be as casual as can you get a glass of beer from the table to your mouth without spilling it if you can that's makes you a member of the club and therefore anybody that can do that can substitute. The club is small, it's four or five guys, you can't have more than that, it doesn't work. But as I say, you know, Jimmy decides to go off traveling to Thailand, it's too bad, this is sparse lot, you know, Pete is just chew on into it and he goes into exactly the same position occupied by Jimmy and everybody treats him as though he was Jimmy. It's weird stuff.

Thank you Jimmy now. What are the other interesting differences between male and female friendships, how they relate, how they bond, why they make up and break up and what can predict their friendships. So the key difference really then is spun off this, or perhaps that a, where putting it is, it actually underpins it. And that is in the way that the dynamics of the relationship, the way it's built up and maintained, with women that is always a conversation-based, because they're always focused on engaging in a kind of discussions of emotional content and relationships in the social world on a one-to-one kind of basis.

And what keeps women's friendships going is the frequencies which they can do that. So if they move apart, whether the friendship survives or not into the future depends on how much effort they put into trying to have conversations and it might be on the phone, it might be on Zoom, or if they can't manage face to face to the... Immanta-to-time-to-face, the amount of time to face conversation has zero effect

on men's friendships, and I mean zero, doesn't affect whether it dies or increases. And that's because their friendships, their social world has built around activities, doing stuff together. So my kind of iconic example of boys bonding is there's this lovely picture of two old Greek men sitting in the sunshine outside of tavernor, either side of a table and every so often they would pick up their

often they would pick up their uzo or their coffee and whatever and take a sip and put it down. But they never said anything. This is boys bonding. Conversation is absolutely unnecessary. I mean, you have to kind of talk to people to get things going, but actually, you know, once it's going, it's what's really important is doing stuff together and conversation then becomes much, much less important. So that dynamic then kind of bears into the size of that inner core of friends, whether you, this best friend phenomenon or not, or whether you just have this, this five layer of kind of best friends, and women will have a five layer, it's just that it's a kind of hub and spoke kind of structure in which the relationships are between pairs of individuals, whereas the boys' five will be kind of much more, I wouldn't hesitate to say the word interconnected,

but it's kind of much lower level and more diffuse in its structure so that it's much better interconnected in the networks. I think that's why their friendships are probably less prone to catastrophic failure than women seem to be. Women's friendships, as I said, have this fragile sort of characteristic to them that they can suddenly just collapse and break because somebody has done something whereas what tends to happen with boys' relationships is they just

drift apart because they just stop bothering to see each other. So they might take a swing at each other if one gets really annoyed but usually what happens if they take a swing at each other is they're just going to have a beer afterwards. No one says that. Having a swing at the end, but it doesn't predicate the friendship continue. It could actually be the beginning of a great friendship. So, I understand. What's interesting in this contact is boys will never talk about why they had a fight. Once it's dealt with, and they've had a drink together, it's kind of never mentioned it unless it's mentioned as a laugh, you know, you remember that. I think that's what it is.

Where is the women in this and resentment made linger? Yeah, yeah, they're much more concerned to go and I want to talk it through with you, you know, why do you do this? And so this is my observation, I'm kind of putting two and two together, but I'm very conscious of the fact in this kind of restorative justice sense where they, you know, the police will offer you this opportunity to go and talk to the prisoner who, you know, robbed you blind and broke into your house and robbed you blind or beat you up in the street and stole your purse off you.

I'd be interested to know what the actual percentages are, but my sense is it's always women that want to do that. The guys would want to be told this and go. Yeah, I did not talk to him or throw them in an octagon together and for five minutes. So I can understand why it would be that women would have this predisposition toward the hub and spoke model, especially with alloparenting, especially with increased physical risk, high tolerance for pain, lower tolerance for pain, higher sensitivity to pain. What is the adaptive reason for why men can have these slightly lower level, a little bit more diffuse, slightly more interconnected, cloud style relationships and friendships as opposed to the hub and spoke model?

I think largely, I don't know, I think the answer is we really don't know, I mean, this clubbing us in male relationships is kind of very conspicuous in the ethnographic literature, because you have these age groups, phenomenon, you have very specific puberty rituals for the boys, where they go through a group ceremony and those groups establish a cohort of similar age kids who are bonded for life. Those age groups are often more important to the young men and even older men than their family relationships. That's partly because a lot of these ceremonies are extremely painful, circumcision, frightening, take them out into

the woods and the dark night and do scary stuff with them, because they're teenagers, but it really bonds them very tightly together. My sense is they're kind of setting up, the community is if you're setting up the defense force for the village, you know. Somebody's got to do it, you need some guys who will go out there and stand together and not abandon each other at the moment. Somebody raises a club in their direction from outside as it were, raiders. And a willing to, you know, stand shoulder to shoulder with the other guys in defending the interest of the village.

That's my guess, but I don't think we really have a good answer to that. It seems a plausible answer to me, but it's not a lot of other people who suggested much the same. The, and I think for that, you know, you have to have to have this intensity with a group. It's not going to work if it's a one-on-one kind of relationship. It has to be a generic sort of, you know, do you belong to my club? If you belong to my club, I don't even need to know your name, but you must be okay. I stand with you.

It's that kind of... I always had it in my head around the reason that men were prepared to let their friends drift away and sometimes come back, but sometimes not, would have been to do with perhaps big game hunting and the risks of warfare that if there is an attack, Pete might not come back. It might be not be that Pete's gone to Thailand. It might be that Pete's been gawd by some war talk. And if that's the case, okay, I can be sad about Pete, but I can't be sad about Pete forever. Whereas I'm going to guess, ancestrally, that homicide and deaths of the kind accidental hunting deaths and stuff like that would have been rarer to women, which would have made the cycle, the turnover

of their friend group bless. Yeah, absolutely so. And there are also some interesting examples of that. So, you know, one of the interesting examples of that is Eskimos, it's high latitudes, especially, because life is very risky out on the ice. So, the women do not go hunting, because it's just farty, dangerous, and the mortality rate historically was so high that the women basically needed two husbands to see herself through her life. Because, you know, in those kind of environments, you have to have somebody bringing the food in because the stuff you can't grow anything, at least not through the winter.

So, you had to have a member of the household who could go and do that. And on the other hand, you could not afford for women to do that because the mortality rate was so great that it would have just left a bunch of kids completely orphaned. So the way they seem to work to it out is to have that as definitely male only job. Now I guess it is somewhat similar with deep sea fishing and Pacific islands as well. It's only men that did that. Women did ensure fishing, but not deep sea fishing. And also it seems that the skimms adjusted the sex ratio to ensure that a woman had available enough men to have two husbands. So it was not polyandry?

Amongst those skimms? No, no. It was female infanticide. It seems. Oh, that's so much adjoining. So, remember, you're living on the edge of survival update, you know, you feel, you know, it seems grim to us, but when your choice is you do some things which may or may not be palestable even to you at the time, nonetheless, you know, it's the difference between surviving and not surviving. The whole thing can just fall apart so easily under those sort of environmental conditions. So they're very, very exceptional in that sense. So I think yesterday, but they're sort of a nice example of how humans can adjust their behavior and social strategies, and even in some sense their psychology, how they see the world. Yeah, at the time.

I think you have. In order to do that, because the way it was done is interestingly complicated to take the pressure off the parents as well. take the pressure off the parents as well. But going back to the way the women try to manage the stress effects, I think one of the other factors that's kind of really only come round to this idea quite relatively recently, so it's not terribly well thought through, but it struck me that some of the species of primates that live in very large dispersed communities have this kind of horror and based structure, which is very much like what you see in hunter-gatherers. So you have a male with just a couple, usually in that case two or three females not too many

Which forming these small family groups and it what it looks like to me is the women using males as higher guns So you get this higher gun effect. I mean is an idea that goes back to Mago Wilson and a few other women ethylogists who came up with the idea back in the 80s and argued that you actually see this on the streets of the cities. Women using men as essentially a hired gun and conditions where they're exposed to high levels of harassment and threat. So in a context where you have large numbers of males kicking around in the community, you know, the sensible idea is to attach yourself to a male who then provides you with protection just keeps the idiots away from you basically.

They don't necessarily have to go out and engage in fisty cuffs. They presumably, if push comes to shove, it's better to have somebody who's handy with their fists, somebody who's not. But, you know, if that's actually, that would explain why we have two things that are kind of peculiar about humans. One is why we have these unusually, have these, living these very large groups, lots of males and females around and have these kind of pair bonded relationships. I use the word pair bonded here rather than monogamous because you pair bonded can be polygamous and have pair bonds in polygamy obviously. The idea that they're actually using the males as a form of protection, then, would explain

why you get this system. And it also would explain something that's slightly peculiar about human make choice, and that is it seems to be driven predominantly by the women. So we have some very nice telephone data, so it's huge samples. This is all the telephone conversations in a year that take place in a single provider from a large European country. So we don't have a six billion phone call, very, very large sample. And if you look at them cross section, you cross stage, because as clear as about the girls starts, so we don't know what happens before the age of 18 because that's the sort of minimum cut off, you can't look at stuff before the age of 18. Unless you have, you know, go through big hoops and in ethics things. So from age 18, you see women starting to focus on phoning a boy of about their own age,

more and more increasingly. It takes the guys about the better part of 5 to 7 years to start doing the same. What I think is going on here and there's this other evidence which points to this same thing. The girls are making a choice very, very early on who they want to go for. And then they go constantly battering on his door, whether it's phoning or just being in the right place, the right time or whatever. Until eventually even the most stupid guy wakes up and goes, oh goodness, well all right, then.

How would you, how would you, how would you square that circle with the male? Wedding bells then ring. Yeah, how would you square that circle with the male over perception bias of attraction? Meaning that men on average seem to presume that the woman that they're speaking to, even if it isn't incredibly platonic, is more into him than she actually is. Why would the man have not cotton on earlier than five to seven years? I think, well, there are several reasons. That's an interesting question, but I don't know.

What we have here, if you like, is two different bits of observation, which then look as though they're there, but nobody's actually ever bothered to put them together, so far. Finally, because I don't think they've kind of, people tend to look at one problem at a time. They look at one side of the coin without looking at the other at the same time. So, it would be nice if people who do courtship studies of this kind and make choice preferences, actually try looking at both together, it might give us, my guess is that

men are just much more casual about these things, right? I suppose you might argue, well, it's because they're not fair about it. But my sense is that if you look at any relationship, if you just look at pictures of happily married couples or pictures of couples in romantic relationships and just look at the eyes, the girl is always looking at the bloke and the bloke is looking into the distance somewhere ever. It's just so real. You couldn't make it up. So I think what happens is girls have the speed decision to lock on to, but instead made the mind up. Everybody wants to marry

Mr. Darsie. They've got a picture of who's the perfect partner is going to be and then they just go for it. And sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. But the point is at the end of the day, somebody has to get the thing off the ground. Otherwise nothing will happen. They'll just sit on opposite sides of the dance floor and ignore each other.

So somebody has to get up and make a move from it and it seems like the girls do it. And my sense is that's because they're one of the outcomes that they're looking for is being able to have what's effectively a hired gun, just like Margaux suggested. And that's because they're making much more complex decisions, as opposed to looking at any of the literature on make-choice strategies, which we did a lot of work on using personal ads long time ago. Men make very simple decisions.

It's basically indices of fertility, so attractiveness and age, and really they're just not interested in anything beyond that. Women are much more demanding in what they specify they're interested in. And as a result, they also say very little about themselves, other than their age and their attractive. They know that. The only thing they're all... You've got to optimize for your market.

You've got to know the market. Yes, absolutely. It is unbelievably accurate that the two sexes understanding of what the other sex is looking for in the mating market. And they adjust their barehouse bar in terms of what they have to offer. But what they offer about themselves, sorry, what they look for, women tend to be much, much more demanding than males, and I think it's because they're trying to balance many more different things in the system, because obviously, from a biological point of view, this whole business is about

reproduction ultimately, so reproduction isn't just producing babies. It's all that follows beyond that in terms of being able to rear them to adult books and so on. So I think, you know, the, it doesn't surprise me pretty this way, that it's, that women should make an early and very clear decision. They're having to make it kind of best of a bad job choice because nobody satisfies all the boxes. So you kind of do the best you can, and you know, and you know, it's a frequency dependent thing that is only one Mr. Darcy in the village, right? And only one person is going to get them. So, you know, if Jamima gets him, you have to settle for the cure. It's fine, but at least you, that's your number two

choice. So, you know, it takes enough boxes to satisfy your requirements. So, you've all these very complex decisions going, but it means they kind of seem to make a much more focused and decisive and early decision on whether to go or who to choose. And the bloats kind of just fall in line, I'm sorry to say. What are you working on next? So for me to try and track the, not only the frequency of books that you put out which is terrifying but also it seems I can't think of a better word it seems meandering in a nice way we've got we've we've had religion we've had friendships we've had the social brain which kind of applies friendships and group health to the business world we've had stuff to do with sex and attraction. What's

next? Well, what can people expect from you next? Well, actually, I'm still trying to sort out what's going on in primate social systems and their evolution, but I think we now have a coherent full story. So the next book is to try and put that all together in one place. Because a lot of this literature is very scattered in journals all over the place. And I think one of the problems is people don't see the big picture. So it's sort of become incumbent on me, I think, to try and bring this all together, present the whole story and show the evidence for it. And then the follow-up book is applying that to humans really. So it's really doing the Friends book with

the data, not the whole of the Friends book, but the essence of how we create communities out of essentially friendships, how friendships scale up to create communities and why we create things, basically what we've been talking about. But this time providing the actual evidence and the assertion that once I've done that I think I'm exhausted of doing this because of and I'm going to do a history book which then applies all this stuff to historical phenomena. You're a monster, you're an absolute beast. No, just a fun, I just have a fun.

You don't understand, Robert, there is a group of my friends who are at Cambridge, who are over here at UT, and every time that you release a new book or that someone spots that a new book comes out, they get posted in one of our group chats, saying, fucking Dunbar's written another book again. And I still haven't finished the proposal for mine. So I look, I absolutely adore all of the work that you do. I really,

really appreciate your time today. I can't wait to see what you do next. And I'm very much looking forward to having the next discussion about whatever it is. Well, it's a great pleasure always to chat to you because it's such fun and thank you for having me. Yes again. Until next time. Thank you mate. Very good. All the best. you