The new linguistic skills that modern Sapiens acquired about seventy millennia ago enabled them to gossip for hours on end. Reliable information about who could be trusted meant that small bands could expand into larger bands, and Sapiens could develop tighter and more sophisticated types of cooperation.1 The gossip theory might sound like a joke,

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Boehm (1999) proposes that gossip can serve as a “leveling mechanism” for neutralizing the dominance tendencies of others, making it a “stealthy activity by which other people’s moral dossiers are constantly reviewed”