Shared fictions are what let strangers cooperate, and that is the first coordination technology. Mutations between roughly 70,000 and 30,000 years ago made minds and language far more flexible, and the flexible language let us build an intersubjective world populated by imaginary entities: gods, spirits, demons, companies, nations. Once tribes organised themselves in relation to shared myths rather than only to known individuals, people could cooperate effectively with others they had never met. Part I's modern illustration is exact: hearing your own language at the next table in a foreign bar produces immediate kinship with people who are strangers in every other respect. Fixtures of an imagined reality act as social glue and let us cooperate in much larger groups than our biological limits allow.

Evidence 1 passage

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enable us to cooperate in much larger groups than our biological limits. These cognitive mutations also gave us a substantially more flexible, and in some ways a more irrational conception of value. With our newfound mental flexibility we became capable of imbuing ideas and objects with value in a m

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