here's a link to the actual paper: https://journals.lww.com/cogbehavneurol/Fulltext/9900/Consciousness_as_a_Memory_System.19.aspx

"[O]our theory of consciousness rejects the idea that consciousness
initially evolved in order to allow us to make sense of the world and
act accordingly, and then, at some later point, episodic memory
developed to store such conscious representations. Our theory is that
consciousness developed with the evolution of episodic memory simply—and
owerfully—to enable the phenomena of remembering"