If Social Intelligence Made Us Human, Women Were Human First

There Must Have Been an Eve Who First Grokked the Human Condition

“Language may well have arisen as a mysterious power possessed largely by women—women who spent much more of their waking time together—and, usually, talking—than did men, women who in all societies are seen as group-minded, in contrast to the lone male image, which is the romanticized version of the alpha male of the primate troop.”

~Terence McKenna, The Food of the Gods, 1993

Moses and many scientists point to humans’ exquisite social reasoning as our special sauce. Or at least that is my read of Genesis, which is a good fit for Adam realizing “I am a moral agent who will one day die.” But you don’t have to accept unorthodox interpretations of the Bible to believe that the first beast to cross the threshold to human cognition was a woman. At some point, there was an Eve who grasped something about the universe and her place within it, setting her apart, and paving the way to our species’ dominance.

My work began in psychometrics, exploring what traits gossip might have caused us to evolve. I hypothesized that recursive self-awareness could naturally emerge from the social dynamics of reputation management.

Now, it is fascinating to consider what it would have felt like for “I” to pierce the primordial soup of subconscious social cognition, and what archeological markers might signal such a transition. But doing so picks up a lot of baggage about what it means to be human, and how involved snakes were in the bootstrapping process. Here I merely want to point out that if human intelligence is primarily social, then women were human first.

The core of the argument is simple: if men fight with fists women wield words. Evolution has sculpted our bodies and minds accordingly. Incredibly, the average man is stronger than a female athlete and women with an IQ of 70 recognize faces as well as men with an IQ of 130. Women’s intuitive grasp of social-emotional intelligence is an evolutionary adaptation, honed over countless generations. These same abilities made us human.

There is a long line of researchers who have argued women were the vanguard of human evolution, even going back to contemporaries of Darwin (cf. Bachofen)¹. More recently, evolutionary biologist Robin Dunbar argued:

“If females formed the core of these early groups, and language evolved to bond these groups, it naturally follows that the early human females were the first to speak. This reinforces the suggestion that language was first used to create a sense of emotional solidarity between allies…This would be consistent with the fact that, among modern humans, women are generally better at verbal skills than men, as well as being more skilful in the social domain.”

~Robin Dunbar, Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language, 1996

But these arguments are usually asides, and I’m not aware of a modern treatment that gives the idea center stage. I have been meaning to remedy this for months, but never found the time. So, I’d like to introduce SnakeCult.net, a place where I can put essays that are not quite bursting out of my chest and instead languish in drafts. It has been fun to vibe code a retro site that loads in one second flat, and fill it with what I hope is not AI slop.

I am still a better researcher and writer than AI, but OpenAI’s Deep Research has some advantages. AI’s strength lies in aggregating and synthesizing existing knowledge, providing a useful average or consensus view—ideal for literature reviews. If you are interested in another 5,000 words on how women stole fire from the gods—with a particularly good treatment of grandmothers—visit SnakeCult.net.

Desktop view of SnakeCult.net

1. Interestingly, the introductory quote from McKenna comes from his book that argues mushrooms were the fruit of knowledge. He finds the symbolic grammar of Genesis useful, but never aks why it is so accurate, even down to the detail of Eve first eating the fruit. I wonder if he had known snake venom is an entheogen whether he would have extended some grace to the Western tradition he so loathed and explored if Genesis is a tale passed down from the very psychedelic event he hypothesized.