Legible Forager Stories

To prevent dominators from taking over bands, early human foragers used language and weapons to empower a talky collective to coordinate to watch for and then punish moves toward such takeovers. This capacity was then also used to enforce other norms. However, once this power center existed, it created incentives for alliances to form to grab this power, to suppress rivals and control others. Though such powers had to be used and justified via the appearance of helping the band, and enforcing norms.Over eons this incentive induced the evolution of abilities to join and control this talky collective, and to use it toward desired ends. In particular, it induced the evolution of abilities of alliance speakers to convince listeners that they understood the nature, plans, and motives of particular band members even better than such folks understood themselves, or their associates understood them. Which could then convince listeners that speaker policy recommendations would be best for such…