The form of information sharing that we do as individuals today is how humans have done it basically forever. In order to survive as a species, you need to share what you know: to explain to one another where the berries are, where the deer are, and what time of year the river gets too high. This kind of information sharing is explicitly not gossip in that it is talk about objects, animals, and problems and not about other people. But we can assume that early humans would have needed to gossip to survive also: to decide, for example, who should go on a hunt, a group would need to discuss who
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