How Did Ancient Humans Invent Gossip?

There's a theory, developed by the anthropologist Robin Dunbar, that starts in a place you'd never expect to find the origins of gossip: the fur of a chimpanzee. Primates spend hours every day grooming one another — picking through fur, removing parasites, offering a kind of physical care that does something beyond hygiene. It builds trust. It maintains alliances. It tells every other member of the group who's close to whom. Dunbar's argument is that as early humans evolved larger, more complex social groups — too large for everyone to physically groom everyone else — language stepped in to do the same job, at a fraction of the time cost. We stopped picking through each other's fur, and started talking about each other instead. Gossip, in other words, may not be a flaw in human social life. It may be the very thing that made large-scale human society possible in the first place.