Spilling Tea for 70,000 Years

How the mundane act of gossiping became humanity’s saving grace.

A few days ago, I was talking to my friend’s 11-year-old daughter. She let me leaf through her school journal—a stitched-together notebook with daily entries about homework and the goings-on of her young life. In a recent entry, she wrote: “Nothing much happened in class today. The highlight was maybe I gossiped with my friend.” (I asked her what the gossip entailed; she started trailing off about who in her grade has a crush on whom—some things never change.)

Next to her entry, her teacher had scribbled a brief but telling note in the margin: “Haha!” It was an innocent moment, an unguarded glimpse of how naturally and effortlessly we share stories about each other. And yet, this simple act—a child chatting with a friend about crushes and the day’s dramas—has roots that stretch back tens of thousands of years.

It’s easy to dismiss gossip as a trivial indulgence, the province of tabloid readers or chatty coworkers. But in his book Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari makes a provocative claim: gossip wasn’t an unfortunate byproduct of language—it was its driving force. Our ancestors didn’t develop complex speech merely to discuss hunting tactics or weather patterns; they evolved language to talk about each other. The whispered rumors of prehistoric campfires were as essential to survival as flint and fire. Just as birds have wings to fly and fish have gills to breathe, humans have language to gossip. 

Seventy thousand years later, we’re still at it. The forms have changed, the venues have multiplied, and the slang has evolved—(we now “spill tea”)—but the instinct remains untouched by time. The teacher’s “Haha!” wasn’t just a note of amusement; it was an acknowledgment of something profoundly human.

Gossip as Survival: The Origins of Our Need to Know

Picture an early Homo sapiens community, small by today’s standards but immense compared to the social structures of other primates. A group of 150 individuals, bound together by necessity, sitting around a fire at dusk. In the flickering light, someone murmurs about a fellow hunter who has been hoarding meat. Another warns that a certain member of the group is reckless, prone to wandering too far from safety. These seemingly simple exchanges weren’t idle chatter—they were early forms of risk management, social checks and balances that maintained trust and cooperation.

This ability to share stories about who could be trusted or who posed a threat gave Homo sapiens a superpower no other species had: the capacity to manage relationships with hundreds of individuals, including strangers. Chimpanzees, our closest evolutionary cousins, can only maintain social groups of around 50 individuals; beyond that, their networks unravel into conflict and chaos. Neanderthals, despite being physically stronger and with comparable brain sizes, also lived in smaller bands. Their inability to expand social circles through gossipy-style communication—to build trust and cooperation beyond intimate groups—may have contributed to their extinction.

In contrast, gossip gave early Homo sapiens the ability to manage relationships with hundreds of individuals—and more importantly, with strangers. The ability to share stories about people we don’t know personally, to hear that someone is trustworthy or dangerous, allowed our ancestors to build expansive, stable communities. Gossip created reputations and enforced social norms, fostering cooperation on a scale that no other species could achieve.

This ability to collaborate gave us a decisive evolutionary advantage. While other species clung to their isolated bands, humans formed tribes, villages, and eventually cities. Think of the sheer feat of packing 20,000 strangers into an arena to enjoy a concert or a sporting event, all without erupting into a bloodbath. It’s a miracle when you think about it. For any other species, such an assembly would likely end in violence—a chaotic free-for-all of fear, mistrust, and dominance displays. But for us, it’s just another Friday night. We can sit shoulder-to-shoulder with total strangers—who are likely to be remarkably different from us in race, background, or beliefs—and remain entirely peaceful (well, mostly), bound by the invisible web of social trust that gossip helped weave over millennia.

From Fireside Whispers to Global Networks

As societies grew more complex, the nature of gossip evolved, but its core purpose remained unchanged. Villages became towns, towns became cities, and the threads of connection stretched further and further. In ancient China, a whispered rumor in the imperial court could shape political fortunes. In medieval Europe, gossip spread through letters, clandestine conversations, and secret missives, forging alliances or toppling regimes.

The printing press amplified gossip to an unprecedented degree. Pamphlets, broadsheets, and eventually newspapers delivered scandal and intrigue to a wider audience than ever before. The 20th century saw the rise of gossip columns, tabloid magazines, radio programs, and talk shows. 

Now, in the digital age, gossip spreads at light speed across Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook. The medieval court has been replaced by the 24/7 churn of social media, where news and rumors can be disseminated, dissected, and dismissed within minutes. The group chat has become a virtual campfire, a place for friends to trade intimate observations, warnings, and judgments. The forum looks different but the instinct is precisely the same: a desire to know, to connect, to map the terrain of our social world.

Embracing the Tea: A Reminder of Our Humanity

In a culture that ruthlessly prizes productivity and efficiency, gossip is often dismissed as a waste of time, a frivolous distraction from more important matters. But this judgment overlooks something fundamental. Gossip is a reminder that we are inherently social creatures, bound together by the stories we share about each other. Whether we’re discussing a coworker’s promotion, a friend’s relationship drama, or a celebrity scandal, we are participating in a ritual as old as humanity itself.

There’s something grounding in this realization. In a world that can feel increasingly fragmented and isolating, gossip offers a subtle acknowledgment that we’re part of a shared social reality. Even when the content seems trivial (as it often is), the act itself is profound. It reinforces the invisible threads of trust and understanding that hold us together. Gossiping is, as the saying goes, the stuff of life.

My friend’s 11-year-old, jotting down her daily gossip with charming ease, seems to instinctively get this. Her stories affirm that these small exchanges matter. In spilling “tea,” we nourish what truly sustains us: connection, curiosity, and the joy of knowing and being a part of each other’s worlds.

So the next time you find yourself caught up in office rumors or the latest viral story on TikTok, remember that you’re tapping into ritualistic tradition that has kept our species alive and thriving for more than 70,000 years. 

We are, and always have been, creatures of the tea.