In the book Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari explains and examines how humans cooperate in extensive systems of shared belief.

Tomasello believes that human ultrasociality arose in two steps. The first was the ability to share intentions in groups of two or three people who were actively hunting or foraging together. (That was the Rubicon.) Then, after several hundred thousand years of evolution for better sharing and collaboration as nomadic hunter-gatherers, more collabo

The secret was probably the appearance of fiction. Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths.