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The Ādam Paradox Hypothesis 136
The Breakthrough: From Grooming to Gossip
The answer, according to Dunbar, is that humans discovered a cheaper form of
grooming: language. Words could do in minutes what grooming required
hours to achieve. Instead of picking lice one by one, a speaker could address
several listeners at once. More importantly, language could transmit
reputations.
In 2004, Dunbar sharpened his argument:
“Language evolved not to exchange technical information but to service the social network —
to enable gossip, the tracking of reputations, and the maintenance of alliances in ever-larger
groups.
” (Dunbar, 2004, p. 100)
This is profound. Gossip, often maligned, was in fact a biological innovation. It
allowed humans to know who could be trusted without direct interaction. In
groups of hundreds, gossip functioned as a distributed ledger of reputations. In
effect, it was a social currency.
Symbols: Multiplying Trust
Language alone, however, cannot explain the scaling of trust to thousands.
Words are ephemeral; they vanish with breath. Symbols, by contrast, are
durable externalizations of meaning. A bead, a painted handprint, a carved
figurine — each encodes a shared identity that endures across time and space.
At Blombos, beads served as badges of belonging. At Diepkloof, engraved
shells acted as contracts. In European caves, animals painted in ochre and
charcoal may have bound groups through shared myths of hunt and spirit.
Each symbol allowed trust to extend beyond face-to-face contact. A stranger
wearing the right bead could be trusted as kin, even without blood ties.
The anthropologist Victor Turner described such processes as ritual
communitas:
“Ritual dissolves the individual into unity, binding strangers into a single community.
”
(Turner, 1969, p. 110)
Through ritual and symbol, individuals became part of a greater whole.
Symbols allowed human groups not only to grow larger but to remain cohesive.