Compiled by: Block unicorn

Abstract

The precursor of money, together with language, helped early modern humans solve cooperation problems that other animals could not solve, including how to achieve mutual benefit, altruism among relatives, and Reduce aggressive issues. These monetary ancestors had very specific characteristics as well as non-fiat currencies – they were much more than just symbolic objects or ornaments.

Currency

When England colonized America in the 17th century, it encountered a trouble at the beginning - a shortage of metal currency [D94] [T01]. The British idea was to use the Americas to grow large amounts of tobacco, provide timber for their global navy and merchant fleet, and then exchange it for the supplies necessary to keep the American lands productive. In effect, early colonists were expected to both work for the company and spend money in its stores. That's what investors and the British Crown want, rather than paying farmers in metal currency, letting them stock up on their own supplies and leaving themselves a little, well, damn profit, as some farmers might suggest.

There are other ways, and they are right under the nose of the colonists, but it took them several years to discover this - the aborigines have their own currency, but it is different from the currency used by Europeans. for different. Indians in the Americas had used currency for thousands of years, and it proved very useful to the newly arrived Europeans - except for those who harbored the prejudice that "real money is the one with the big shot's face on it." Worst of all, these New England natives used neither gold nor silver, but the most suitable materials found in their environment—the long-lasting parts of the bones of their prey. To be more specific, they are beads (wampum) made from the shells of hard-shelled clams such as venus mercenaria and strung together into pendants.

Beaded necklace. During the transaction, people would count out the number of beads, take them out and string them onto a new necklace. Native American beads were sometimes strung into belts or other commemorative or ceremonial objects to indicate wealth or commitment to some treaty.

These clams can only be found in the sea, but these beads can be found far inland. A variety of shell currencies can be found among tribes across the American continent. The Iroquois never set foot in the mussel habitat, but their collection of beaded treasures exceeds that of any other tribe. Only a few tribes, such as the Narragansett, were skilled at making beads, but hundreds of tribes, mostly hunter-gatherers, used beads as currency. Beaded necklaces vary greatly in length, and the number of beads is proportional to the length of the necklace. Necklaces can always be cut or connected in series to form a length corresponding to the price of the product.

Once the colonists got over their doubts about the source of currency's value,They also started buying and selling beads like crazy. Mussels have also become another word for “money” in American lingo. The Dutch governor of New Amsterdam (now known as "New York") borrowed a large sum of money from the English-American bank - in the form of beads. The British authorities were forced to agree, and between 1637 and 1661 beads became a legal debt-paying instrument in New England, giving the colonists a highly liquid medium of exchange, and colonial trade flourished.

But as the British began to ship more metal currency to the Americas and the Europeans began to use their large-scale manufacturing techniques, the shell currency gradually declined. By 1661, the English authorities had thrown in the towel and agreed to pay in the kingdom's metallic currency—that is, gold and silver, and that year wampum was deposed as a legal debt-paying instrument in New England.

But in 1710, beads were adopted as a legal instrument of debt repayment in North Carolina, and they have been used as a medium of exchange even into the 20th century; but due to Western harvesting and manufacturing technology, The value of beads increased a hundred times. Later, with the advent of the metal currency era, it also followed the footsteps of gold and silver jewelry in the West, gradually turning from carefully crafted currency into an ornament. In the American language, shell currency has also become a strange old term - after all, "100 shells" has become "100 dollars." “Shelling out” has become paying with metal currency or banknotes, and now it has become paying with checks or credit cards [D94]. (Translator's note: Shell means shell, that is, "shelling out" initially means giving a shell)

We didn't realize that this had touched the origin of our species.

Collectibles

In addition to shells, there have been many forms of currency on the American continent. Hair, teeth, and a host of other things are widely used as media of exchange (their shared properties will be discussed later).

Twelve thousand years ago, in what is now Washington state, the Clovis people crafted some amazing long flint blades. The only problem is that these blades break too easily - which means they can't be used to cut anything at all. These flints are made "solely for fun" or for some purpose that has nothing to do with cutting anything at all.

As we will see later, this superficial frivolity is very likely to play a very important role in their survival.

Native Americans were not the first people to make beautiful but useless flint tools, nor were they the first people to invent shell currency; it is necessary to add that neither were Europeans, although they had There was also extensive use of shells and teeth as currency - not to mention cattle, gold, silver, weapons and other things.The Asians used all these things, as well as fake axes issued, but they also introduced this tool (shells). Archaeologists have discovered shell necklaces dating back to the early Paleolithic era — easily replacing the currency used by Native Americans.

Pea-sized beads made from the shells of the conch Nassarius kraussianus. These conchs live in estuaries. Found from Blombos Cave, South Africa. Dated 75,000 years ago.

In the late 1990s, archaeologist Stanley Ambrose discovered necklaces made from ostrich eggshells and shell fragments hidden in a stone bunker in Kenya's Great Rift Valley. They used the (40Ar/42Ar) argon dating method to date the necklace to at least 40,000 years ago. Animal tooth beads found in Spain also date to this era. Perforated shells from the Early Paleolithic have also been found in Lebanon. Recently, intact shells (prepared for beads) were discovered at Blombos Cave in South Africa, dating back to 75,000 years ago!

Ostrich eggshell beads, found in the East African Rift Valley in Kenya. 40,000 years ago. (Thanks to Stanley Ambrose)

These modern subspecies of humans migrated to Europe, where shell necklaces and teeth appeared, 40,000 years ago. Necklaces of shells and teeth appeared in Australia 30,000 years ago. In all cases, the craftsmanship involved suggests that such practices can be traced back even further than archaeological work has revealed. The origins of collectibles and ornaments are most likely in Africa, where anatomically modern humans originated. There must have been some vital survival advantage to collecting and crafting necklaces, as they were a luxury - making them required both skill and time, at a time when humans were constantly on the verge of starvation.

Basically all human cultures, even those that did not engage in large-scale trade or use more modern forms of currency, made and appreciated jewelry and items whose artistic or heritage value far outweighed their practical utility. thing. We humans collect shell necklaces and other forms of jewelry—just for pleasure. To evolutionary psychologists, the idea that humans do things just for pleasure is not an explanation at all, it just raises a question. Why do so many people find the shine of collectibles and jewelry pleasing? More bluntly, the question is - what evolutionary advantage did this pleasure give humans?

Necklace found in a tomb in Sungir, Russia, 28,000 years ago. Beads that are internally interlocking and interchangeable. Each mammoth ivory bead may take an hour or two of labor to make.

Evolution, Cooperation, and Collectibles

Evolutionary psychology grew out of a key mathematical discovery by John Maynard Smith. Smith borrowed the population model of co-evolving genes (this model comes from the well-developed field of Population Genetics) and pointed out that genes can correspond to behavioral strategies, that is, in simple strategy problems (i.e., game theory meaning) good or bad strategies encoded in "games").

Smith proved that the competitive environment can be expressed as a strategic problem, and these genes must win the competition in order to be inherited into subsequent generations. Therefore, genes will evolve Nash equilibrium related to strategic problems. These competitive games include the Prisoner's Dilemma (which is typical of cooperative game problems) and the Hawk/Dove strategy problem (which is typical of offensive strategy problems).

The key to Smith's theory is that although these strategic games seem to be played out in body shape, in a fundamental sense they are played out between genes - that is, the competition for the spread of genes. It is genes (not necessarily individuals) that influence behavior and appear to have bounded rationality (encoding the best possible strategy within the range that the biological body can express. Of course, the biological body is also affected by biological raw materials and previous evolutionary history. influence) and "selfish" (to borrow Richard Dawkins' metaphor) appearance. The influence of genes on behavior is an adaptation to the competition between genes through body shape. Smith calls these evolving Nash equilibria "evolutionarily stable strategies."

Those "classical theories" based on early individual selection theories, such as sexual selection and pro-selection theory, were dissolved in this more general model, which subversively placed genes rather than individuals in at the center of evolutionary theory. So Dawkins used an oft-misunderstood analogy—the “selfish gene”—to describe Smith’s theory.

Few other species are more cooperative than even Paleolithic humans. In some cases, such as incubation and colonization of species such as ants, termites and bees, animals can cooperate among relatives - precisely because this can help replicate the "selfish genes" that they and their relatives share. In some very extreme situations, non-relatives can also cooperate, which evolutionary psychologists call "mutualism." As Dawkins describes, unless the transaction is paid for by both parties at the same time, one party in the transaction can cheat (sometimes even instant transactions are difficult to avoid fraud). And if they can defraud they usually do. This is BoA common outcome in a game that game theorists call the "Prisoner's Dilemma" - if all parties cooperate, each party can get a better outcome, but if one party chooses to cheat, he can betray the other fool. And make a profit for yourself. In a population of cheaters and fools, the cheater always wins (hence making cooperation difficult). However, some animals cooperate through repeated games and a strategy called tit-for-tat: cooperate in the first round of the game, then cooperate all the time until the opponent chooses to cheat, and then cheat to protect themselves. The threat of retaliation will keep both parties from cooperating.

But in general, in the animal world, the actual cooperation between individuals is very limited. A major limitation of this kind of cooperation lies in the relationship between the two partners: at least one of them is more or less forced to be close to the other participants. The most common scenario is when a parasite and host evolve into a symbiont. If the interests of the parasite and the host are aligned, then symbiosis will be more appropriate than each going his own way (i.e. the parasite will also provide some benefit to the host); then, if they successfully enter into a tit-for-tat game, they will evolve into symbionts, In this state, their interests, especially the mechanisms of genetic exit from one generation to the next, are aligned. They become like a single organism. However, in fact, there is not only cooperation but also exploitation between the two, and it happens at the same time. This situation is very similar to another system developed by humans - tribute - which we will analyze later.

There are also some very special examples that do not involve parasite and host, but do share the same body and become symbionts. These examples involve unrelated animals with very limited territorial space. A beautiful example given by Dawkins is the small cleaner fish, which swim in the mouth of the host and eat the bacteria in it to maintain the health of the host fish. The host fish can deceive the little fish - wait until they've done their job and then devour them. But the host fish didn't. Because both parties are constantly moving, either party is free to leave the relationship. However, cleaner fish have evolved a very territorial attitude, with stripes and dances that are difficult to imitate – much like a trademark that is difficult to forge. So the host fish know where to find the cleaning service—and they know that if they cheat the minnows, they'll have to find a new group of minnows. The entry cost of this symbiotic relationship is high (and therefore the exit cost), so both parties can cooperate happily without fraud. Additionally, cleaner minnows are very small, so the benefits of eating them are outweighed by the cleaning services of a small school of fish.

Another highly relevant example is the vampire bat. True to its name, this bat sucks the blood of mammals. The interesting thing is that it is very unpredictable whether you can suck blood. Sometimes you can eat a lot, and sometimes you can eat nothing. Therefore, fortunatelyThe (or more sophisticated) bats will share their prey with less lucky (and clever) bats: the giver will spit out the blood, and the recipient will gratefully eat it.

In most cases, the giver and the recipient are related. Of the 110 such instances observed by the uncannily enduring biologist G.S. Wilkinson, 77 involved mothers nursing their children, and most of the others involved genetic kinship. However, there are still a few cases that cannot be explained by kin altruism. To explain this partial example of mutualism, Wilkinson mixed bats from two groups to form a single population. He then observed that, with rare exceptions, bats tended to only care for old friends from their old groups.

This kind of cooperation requires the establishment of a long-term relationship, which means that partners must interact frequently, understand each other, and track each other's behavior. Caves help confine bats into long-term relationships where such cooperation is possible.

We will also learn that some humans, like vampire bats, choose high-risk and unstable harvesting methods, and they will also share the surplus of production activities with unrelated people. In fact, they accomplish this far more than vampire bats do, and how they accomplish this is the subject of this article. "Money is a formal marker of delayed reciprocal altruism," Dawkins says, but then he stops advancing this charming notion. This is the task of our article.

In small human groups, public reputation can replace retaliation from a single individual and promote cooperation through delayed exchange. However, reputation systems can suffer from two larger problems - difficulty in identifying who did what, and difficulty in assessing the value or damage caused by the action.

Memorying faces and corresponding favors is a considerable cognitive hurdle, but one that most humans find relatively easy to overcome. Recognizing faces is easier, but recalling an occurrence of help when needed can be harder. Remembering the details of a favor that brought some value to the recipient is even harder. It is impossible to avoid arguments and misunderstandings, or it can be so difficult that such help cannot occur.

The problem of evaluation, or value measurement, is very broad. For humans, this problem exists in any system of exchange—whether favors, barter, currency, credit, employment, or market transactions. This question is also important in the context of extortion, taxation, tribute, and even judicial punishment. Even more important is the question of reciprocal altruism in animals. Think of monkeys doing each other favors - say, exchanging a piece of fruit for a scratch on their back. Grooming each other can repel lice and fleas that you can't see or catch on your own. However, how many times of grooming and how many pieces of fruit should be considered to make both parties feel that it is "fair" and not a rip-off? Is a 20-minute grooming service worth one piece of fruit or two pieces of fruit? How big a piece?

Even the simplest "blood for blood" transaction is more complicated than it seems. How does a bat estimate the value of the blood it receives? In terms of weight, volume, taste and satiety? Or other factors? This kind of quantitative complexity is exactly the same in the monkey's "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" transaction.

Although there are many potential trading opportunities, animals have difficulty solving the problem of value measurement. Even in the simplest model of remembering a face and matching it to a history of favors, getting all parties to agree on the value of the favor with sufficient accuracy at the outset is an important issue for animals to develop reciprocity. obstacle.

But the stone toolboxes left behind by Paleolithic humans seem a little too complex for our brains. (Translator’s Note: That is to say, if the brains of modern humans are so complex, what kind of cooperation did humans in the Paleolithic Age use to create these things, and what was their purpose?) p>

Tracing the favors associated with these stones—who, for whom, what quality of tools were made, and who owed whom what, etc.—can become very difficult if it crosses tribal boundaries. complex. In addition, there may be a large amount of organic matter and temporary services (such as beauty), etc., that have not survived. Keeping even a small portion of these traded goods and services in mind will make it increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to match people and things as the number increases. If cooperation also occurred between tribes, as the archaeological record suggests it did, the problem becomes more difficult, since hunter-gatherer tribes are often highly hostile and distrustful of each other.

If shells can be money, furs can be money, gold can be money, etc. - if money is not just coins and notes issued under legal tender laws, but can be many different things Stuff - So what is the nature of money?

And why do humans, who are constantly on the verge of starvation, spend so much time making and admiring necklaces that they could be spending hunting and gathering?

Nineteenth-century economist Carl Menger was the first to describe how money evolved naturally and emerged inexorably from massive barter transactions. Modern economics tells a story similar to Menger's version.

Bartering requires a coincidence of interest on both sides of the transaction. Alice grows some walnuts and needs some apples; Bob happens to grow apples and wants to eat walnuts. And they happen to live close to each other, and Alice trusts Bob and is willing to wait quietly between the walnut harvest and the apple harvest. Assuming all these conditions are met, there is nothing wrong with bartering. But if Alice grows oranges, even if Bob wants oranges, that’s no good.——Oranges and apples cannot grow in the same climate. If Alice and Bob do not trust each other and cannot find a third party to act as an intermediary or enforce the contract, then their wishes will be in vain.

More complex situations may exist. Alice and Bob cannot fully fulfill their promise to sell walnuts or apples in the future because, there are other possibilities, Alice could keep the best walnuts for herself and sell the inferior ones to the other party (Bob could do the same). Comparing quality, comparing the quality of two different things, is even more difficult than the above problems, especially when one of the things has become a memory. Also, neither man could predict events such as a bad harvest. These complexities greatly increase the difficulty of the problems Alice and Bob deal with, making it more difficult for them to confirm whether the delayed reciprocal transactions can really achieve reciprocal effects. The greater the time and uncertainty between the initial transaction and the return transaction, the greater these complexities will be.

A related problem (which engineers may be aware of) is that barter “doesn’t scale”. When the quantity of goods is small, barter is still feasible, but its cost will gradually increase with the increase in volume, until it is so expensive that it is not worth doing such an exchange. Suppose there are N kinds of goods and services, then there will be N2 prices in a barter market. Five items would result in 25 relative prices, which is okay; but 500 items would result in 250,000 prices, which is far more than one can realistically track prices. But with money, only N prices are needed – 500 goods are 500 prices. When used in this scenario, money acts as both a medium of exchange and a standard of value—as long as the price of the currency itself is not too large to be remembered or changes too frequently. (This latter issue, combined with implicit insurance "contracts" and the lack of a competitive market, may explain why prices typically evolve over the long term rather than being determined by near-term negotiations.)

< p>In other words, exchanging things for things requires a coincidence of supplies (or skills), preferences, time, and low transaction costs. The transaction costs of this model will grow much faster than the growth of commodity types. Bartering is certainly better than no trading at all, and has been widely used. But compared to trade using currency, it is still quite limited.

Primitive currencies existed for a long time before large-scale trade networks emerged. Money had an even more important use before. Money greatly improves the efficiency of small barter networks by greatly reducing the need for credit. Perfect coincidences of preferences are significantly less common than intertemporal coincidences of preferences. With currency, Alice can collect blueberries for Bob this month when they are ripe, and Bob can collect them 6 months later when the big animals migrate.Hunt for Alice without having to remember who owes how much to whom, or trusting each other's memory and integrity. A mother's significant investment in childcare can be protected by the gift of something of value that cannot be counterfeited. And money also transforms the problem of division of labor from a prisoner's dilemma to simple exchange.

The primitive currency used by hunter-gatherer tribes is very different from modern currency in appearance and the role that modern currency plays in modern culture; primitive currency may have some functions limited to small trading networks and local exercised in institutions (we will discuss this later). Therefore, I think it would be more appropriate to call them “collectibles” rather than “currency”. In the anthropological literature, the term "money" is also used for such items; this is a broader definition than issued banknotes and metal currency, but more vague than "collectibles" as we use it in this article. "things of value" is much narrower (things of value will be used to refer to things that are not collectibles in the sense of this article).

The reasons for choosing "collectibles" rather than other terms to refer to primitive currencies will become apparent below. Collectibles have very specific properties and are never just decorative. While the specific objects and valuable attributes of collections vary across cultures, they are by no means chosen arbitrarily. The primary function of collectibles, and their ultimate function in evolution, is as a medium for storing and transferring wealth. Some types of collectibles, such as necklaces, are well suited to being used as currency in a way that even we (who live in a modern society with economic and social conditions that encourage trade) can understand. I also occasionally use "primitive currency" instead of "collectibles" to discuss wealth transfers before the age of metallic currency.

Proceeds from Trade

Individuals, clans, and tribes voluntarily engage in trade because both parties believe they have gained something. Their value judgments may change after trade, for example if they gain experience with goods and services as a result of trade (and thus change their criteria of judgment). However, at the time of the transaction, their value judgment may not be accurately commensurate with the value of the transaction, but they will generally not be wrong in judging whether the transaction is beneficial. Especially in early intertribal trade, where trade was limited to high-value items, each party had strong incentives to make their judgments accurate. As a result, trade almost always benefits all parties. In terms of value creation, trading activities are comparable to physical activities such as production and manufacturing.

Because individuals, clans, and tribes differ in their preferences, their ability to satisfy their preferences, and their perceptions of their own skills and preferences and their results, they always benefit from trade. harvested. Whether the costs of conducting trade itself—transaction costs—are low enough to make such trade worthwhile is another question. In our time, much more trade can take place than in most previous times. However, as we will see below, certain types of trade are consistently worth the transaction costs, and for some culturesFor example, such transactions can even be traced back to the beginnings of homo sapiens sapiens.

It’s not just voluntary spot trading that benefits from lower transaction fees. This point is crucial to understanding the origins and evolution of money. Family heirlooms can be used as collateral, eliminating the credit risk of delayed exchanges. The ability to collect tribute from defeated tribes is a great benefit to the victorious tribe; and this ability can benefit from the same transaction fee technology as trade; the arbiter assesses the consequences of behavior that violates customs and laws. This is true of actual harm, and even marriages arranged by kinship groups. When receiving an inheritance, relatives will undoubtedly benefit more from timely and peaceful gifts of wealth by inheritance. The main activities of human life that are isolated from the business world in modern culture benefit from technology that reduces transaction costs in no way less than the promotion of transaction activities, or even more. And none of these technologies is more efficient, more important, or appeared earlier than the original currency - collectibles.

Human numbers subsequently exploded after Homo sapiens replaced Neanderthals (H. sapiens neanderthalis). Excavations in Europe, dating from 35,000 to 40,000 years ago, show that Homo sapiens increased the carrying capacity of the environment 10 times more than Neanderthals did—that is, a 10-fold increase in population density. Not only that, but the newcomers also had time to create some of the world's earliest art—beautiful cave paintings, a variety of intricate sculptures—and, of course, necklaces made of seashells, teeth, and eggshells.

These objects are not useless decorations. New and efficient ways of transferring wealth were brought about by these collections and possibly more advanced advancements and languages; the new cultural tools thus created may have played an important role in improving the carrying capacity of the environment.

As newcomers, Homo sapiens had brains comparable to those of Neanderthals, softer bones, and less muscular muscles. Their hunting tools were more elaborate, but 35,000 years ago, the tools were essentially the same—not even twice as efficient, let alone 10 times as efficient. The biggest difference may be the wealth transfer tools created and even more efficient by collectibles. Homo sapiens derived pleasure from collecting shells and using them to create jewelry, display jewelry, and even trade with each other. Neanderthals did not. Perhaps it is because of the same mechanism that Homo sapiens survived the vortex of human evolution tens of thousands of years ago and emerged in the Serengeti plains of Africa.

We should talk about how collectibles reduce transaction fees by type -From voluntary free bequests, to voluntary mutual trade and marriage, to involuntary judicial decisions and tributes.

All types of value transfers have occurred in many prehistoric cultures, probably dating back to the beginnings of Homo sapiens. The benefits to one or more parties from the transfer of wealth during life events are large enough to ignore the high transaction costs. Compared to modern money, primitive money had a very low velocity—it might change hands only a handful of times in an average person's lifetime. However, a long-lasting collectible, what we today call an "heirloom," can remain intact for generations and increase in value with each change of hands—often allowing things that otherwise would not have happened. Transactions are possible. The tribe therefore spends a lot of time on seemingly meaningless crafting tasks and on exploring new materials for use.

Kula Circle

The Kula trade network in the Melanesian islands during pre-colonial times. Kula is both a “very powerful” currency and a monument to stories and legends. Goods that could be traded with each other (mostly agricultural products) were spread over different seasons, so barter was not an option. Kula collectibles have unforgeable valuable value and can be worn and circulated; as a currency, it solves the problem of double coincidence of needs. Because this problem can be solved, a bracelet or necklace can acquire a value higher than its manufacturing cost after a few trades, and can continue to circulate for decades. Legends and stories about the collection’s previous owners further provide information on upstream credit and liquidity. In Neolithic cultures, circulation collectibles (usually shells) tended to be more irregular in shape, but had similar purposes and attributes.

Kula bracelet (mwali)

Kula necklace (bagi)

For any instrument that has wealth transfer as its primary function, we can ask the following questions:

Two events (i.e. Does the time interval between the production of the traded item and its application have to meet some kind of coincidence? How much of an obstacle would the impossibility of coincidence create to wealth transfer?

Can the transfer of wealth form a cycle of collections based only on this tool, or does it require other tools to form a complete cycle? Carefully studying the actual picture of money circulation is crucial to understanding the birth of money. For most of human prehistory, monetary circulation covering a large number of different transactions did not exist and could not exist. Without complete and repeated cycles, collections cannot circulate and become worthless. For a collectible to be worth making, it must be able to mediate enough transactions to amortize its manufacturing costs.

WeLet’s first examine the most familiar and economically important type of wealth transfer today—trade.

Hunger Insurance

Bruce Winterhalder observed occasional patterns of food transfers between animals: tolerated thieves, production/begging/opportunism, risk-sensitive survival situations, as by-products of reciprocity, ex post rewards, non-spot exchange, and other patterns (including kin altruism). Here, we only look at risk-sensitive survival situations, delayed reciprocity, and non-spot transactions. What we argue is that replacing delayed reciprocity with mutual exchanges of food-collectibles can increase the degree of food sharing. Doing so reduces the risks posed by variable food supplies and avoids most of the problems that cannot be overcome using delayed reciprocity between bands. We will deal later with the problem of kin altruism and thieves (whether forgiven or not) in a larger context.

Food has a higher value to a hungry person than to a full person. If a hungry and desperate man could use his most valuable possessions to save his life, wouldn't the months of labor spent on that treasure be considered worthwhile. People often think that their lives are worth more than that family heirloom. Collectibles, then, are like fat, providing insurance against food shortages. Famine caused by local food shortages can be remedied in at least two ways - the food itself, and the rights to forage and hunt.

However, transaction costs are generally too high—wars between groups are more common than mutual trust. Groups that cannot find food often starve. But if transaction costs can be lowered by reducing the need for mutual trust between groups, food worth just one day's labor to one group may be worth several months' labor to a hungry tribe (and they can trade with each other).

As mentioned in this article, the most valuable transactions that can be achieved on a small scale appeared in many cultures with the emergence of collectibles in the Upper Paleolithic Age. Collectibles replace the long-term relationship of trust that would otherwise exist (but does not exist). If there has been long-term interaction and mutual trust between tribes or between individuals from different tribes, the credit issuance between them does not require guarantees, which will greatly stimulate inter-temporal barter exchange. However, such a high degree of mutual trust is unimaginable - because of the issues mentioned above about the reciprocal altruism model, and these theories are also confirmed by empirical evidence: most of the relationships we observe between hunter-gatherer tribes The relationship is very tense. For most of the year, hunter-gatherer tribes would disperse into small groups, occasionally joining into "aggregates" like medieval gatherings for only a few weeks of the year. Although there is no trust between groups, an important trade in products, of the type shown in the accompanying photo, almost certainly occurred in Europe and almost everywhere, such as the United StatesBig game hunting tribes of Europe and Africa.

The scenario demonstrated in the attached picture is completely theoretical, but it would be very surprising if it were not the case. While many European humans during the Paleolithic period wore shell necklaces, many humans living further inland would use their teeth rather than shells to make necklaces. It is also very possible that flint, axes, furs, and other collectibles were used as media of trade.

Caribou, bison and other game animals migrate at different times of the year. Different tribes specialized in hunting different prey, and more than 90% or even 99% of Paleolithic remains in Europe come from the same species. This situation suggests the existence of at least a seasonal division of labor within a tribe, or even a complete division of labor within a tribe for one prey species. To achieve such a degree of specialization, individual tribe members would have to become experts on the prey, familiar with its behavior, migration habits, and other behavioral patterns, as well as the specialized tools and techniques used to kill it. Some of the tribes we have observed in recent times have a division of labor. Some North American Indian tribes specialized in hunting bison, antelope, and salmon. In parts of northern Russia and Finland, many tribes, including the Lapps, even to this day, herd only one type of reindeer.

Large wild animals that are not afraid of humans no longer exist. During the Paleolithic, they were either driven to extinction or learned to fear humans and their projectile weapons. However, for much of the era of Homo sapiens, wild animals were plentiful and easily captured by expert hunters. According to our trade-subsistence theory, it is very likely that the degree of specialization was higher in the Paleolithic period because of the abundance of large game animals (horses, bison, elk, reindeer, giant sloths, mastadons, mammoths, zebras, elephants, Hippos, giraffes, musk oxen, etc.) roam the continents of North America, Europe, and Africa in large herds. This division of hunting among tribes is also consistent with Paleolithic archaeological evidence unearthed in Europe (although it cannot be said to have been reliably proven).

These migrating groups, following their prey, often interact with each other, creating many trade opportunities. Indians in the Americas preserved food by drying and making pemmican, an activity that lasted for several months but generally not for a full year. This food is exchanged for leather, weapons, and collectibles. Typically these transactions occur during annual trade events.

Migrating large groups of animals only pass through a territory twice a year, often with intervals of one to two months; without other sources of protein, these specialized tribes will starve to death. Only trade made possible the high degree of specialization reflected in the archaeological evidence. Therefore, even if you can only exchange meat between different seasons, the collection is still worth using.

The necklaces, flints, and other items used as currency circulated back and forth in a closed loop., as long as the amount of meat being traded is roughly the same, the number of collectibles used for trading will also be roughly the same. Note that, assuming that the collectible circulation theory constructed in this article is correct, one-way beneficial trade is not enough. We must identify closed loops of favorable trade in both directions, in which collectibles circulate continuously and dilute the costs of their manufacture.

As mentioned above, we know from archaeological evidence that many tribes specialized in hunting a single species of large animal. In other words, hunters at least hunt different animals according to seasons (seasonal division of labor within a tribe); if there is extensive trade, it is possible that a tribe only hunts one kind of prey in a year (inter-tribal division of labor). complete division of labor). Although a tribe could gain huge production benefits by becoming an expert on animal habits and mastering the best hunting methods, such benefits would not be possible if it had to harvest nothing for most of the year.

If trade had taken place only between two complementary tribes, the total supply of food might have been almost twice as much. However, in the Serengeti steppes, as well as the European steppes, more than a dozen animals tend to pass through instead of just two. Thus, for a specialized tribe, the availability of meat would be more than doubled due to trade. What's more, the extra meat will be available when people need it.

Therefore, even the simplest trading cycle consisting of two prey and two transactions of different periods but compensating each other can provide participants with at least 4 types of benefits (or "surpluses"). Source):

Eat meat during the season when you would otherwise be hungry;

Increase in the total supply of meat—— They can sell meat that they can’t eat or save right now; after all, if they don’t trade it, it will just be wasted;

You can eat different meats, which will increase nutritional diversity;< /p>

Higher productivity due to specialization in hunting activities.

Making or saving collectibles to trade for food isn't the only insurance against hungry times. Perhaps more common (especially in areas where large game hunting is not possible), are territorial transferable hunting rights. This can be observed in many of the remaining hunter-gatherer cultures today.

The !Kung San people of southern Africa, like all remaining hunter-gatherer cultures today, live on the edge. They had no opportunity to become professional hunters and had to exploit the meager resources available. Perhaps they were therefore less like ancient hunter-gatherer cultures, nor like primitive Homo sapiens (i.e., those who took the most fertile lands and best hunting routes from Neanderthals and only later brought them to Complete expulsion of races from marginalized areas). But despite living in a harsh natural environment, the !Kung also used their collections for trade.

Similar to most hunter-gatherer cultures, the !Kung people lived in small, dispersed groups for much of the year, with only a fewIt only takes a few weeks to get together with several other groups. Assemblies are like bazaars with extra features - enabling trade, solidifying alliances, strengthening partnerships, buying and selling in-laws. The preparation for the gathering is to create tradable items, some of which are practical, but most of which are collectibles. This trading system, called !Kung hxaro, involved the trade of large quantities of hanging jewelry, including ostrich eggshell necklaces; these collections are very similar to those found in Africa 40,000 years ago.

! Patterns of the hxaro trading system and kinship relationships among neighboring tribes of the Kung people

Necklace for haxro trade

!One of the things the Kung trade for collectibles is to gain access to other groups' territories (and to gather and hunt) abstract rights. This trade was particularly active when local food was scarce, as starvation could be alleviated by foraging on neighbors' territories. !Kung people mark their group's territory with arrows; trespassing without purchasing the right to enter and forage is akin to declaring war. Like food trade between groups, using collectibles to buy the right to forage is an “insurance measure against hunger” (to paraphrase Stanley Ambrose).

Although anatomically modern people can think, speak consciously and have certain planning abilities, trade requires almost no advanced thinking and language abilities, and even more planning abilities are required. Less. Because tribe members did not need to infer benefits beyond trade. To produce such a tool, it is enough for people to follow an instinct for objects with certain properties (as we have seen from indirect observations that accurately assess these properties). This also applies to varying degrees to the other institutions we are about to learn about - they are evolved rather than consciously designed. No one involved would explain the workings of these institutions in terms of evolutionary function; instead, they would use many different myths to explain the behavior, and the myths were more about direct incentives for the behavior than about it. The theory of origin and ultimate purpose.

Direct evidence of food trade has been lost to history. It is possible that we will find more direct evidence in the future than we do now, by comparing the hunting patterns of one extant hunting tribe with those of another. Comparison of Consumption Patterns - The hardest part may be discerning the boundaries of different tribes or kin groups. According to our theory, such intertribal meat exchanges should have occurred throughout much of the Paleolithic period, when large-scale specialized hunting took place.

Now, we have additional circumstantial evidence, which is the transfer of the collection itself. Fortunately, objects become collectiblesThe long-term retention properties required are the same properties that allow artifacts to survive to this day and be discovered by archaeologists.

The mainstream of inter-tribal relations is mutual distrust in good times, and fighting and killing in bad times. Only ties of marriage or kinship enabled different tribes to trust each other, albeit only incidentally and to a limited extent. Although collectibles can be worn or hidden in carefully hidden cellars, the fragile ability to protect property means that the cost of manufacturing must be amortized in a handful of transactions. Therefore, trade must not have been the only form of wealth transfer, and it may not even have been the most dominant one in humankind's long prehistory, when transaction costs were so high that it was impossible to develop markets, businesses, and other things we take for granted today. economic system. Beneath our great economic institutions lie older institutions that also involve the transfer of wealth. All these systems make Homo sapiens stand out from all animals. We now turn to one of the most basic forms of wealth transfer—one that humans take for granted but animals don’t seem to possess—legacy.

Kin Altruism Beyond Death

Coincidences of supply and demand in time and geography are extremely rare, so rare that most types of trade and trade-based economic systems we take for granted today cannot exist. It is even less likely that a triple coincidence could satisfy the needs of provision and kin group events (such as the founding of a new family, death, crime, victory or defeat). So we will see that both clans and individuals benefited deeply from the timely transfer of wealth during these events. Moreover, such wealth transfers are less wasteful because they involve only the transfer of value of long-term stores of wealth, not consumer goods or tools for other purposes. These institutions often require a durable and versatile store of wealth more urgently than transactions require a medium of exchange. Furthermore, the institution of marriage, inheritance, dispute settlement, and tribute may have appeared earlier than intertribal trade and involved more wealth transfers than trade. Thus, these institutions more powerfully contributed to the emergence of primitive money than did trade.

Among most hunter-gatherer tribes, the transfer of wealth took a form that we rich moderns would trivialize: a set of wooden utensils, flint and bone tools, There are also weapons, strings of shells, even a hat or, in colder climates, perhaps some mossy fur. Sometimes all of these are things that can be worn on the body. These various things were hunter-gatherer wealth, equivalent to our real estate, stocks, and bonds. For hunter-gatherers, tools and warm clothing were necessary for survival. Many items in the wealth transfer are very valuable collectibles that can be used to fight hunger, buy companions, and even save lives in wars and defeats.

The ability to transfer survival capital to future generations is another advantage that Homo sapiens has over other animals. Furthermore, skilled tribesmen or clans can use excess consumption toTransactions that exchange goods for lasting wealth (especially collectibles) only happen occasionally, but they can accumulate over a lifetime. A temporary adaptive advantage is thus transformed into a long-term adaptive advantage for future generations.

Another form of wealth (which cannot be discovered by archaeologists) is official position. Among many hunter-gatherer tribes, social status was more valuable than physical wealth. Such social positions included tribal chieftains, army chiefs, hunting party leaders, members of long-term trading partnerships (with other tribes), midwives, and leaders. Often collectibles not only reflected wealth but were also a symbol of tribal duty and status. When a person of status dies, his successor must be quickly and clearly appointed in order to maintain order. Delays can breed malicious conflict. Therefore, the funeral became a public event, in which the deceased was treated with courtesy and his tangible and intangible wealth was distributed to his descendants. The distribution was determined by tradition, tribal decision-makers, and the will of the deceased.

As Marcel Mauss and other anthropologists have pointed out, other types of free gifts besides inheritance were very rare in premodern cultures. What appears to be a free gift actually implies obligations on the part of the recipient. Before the advent of contract law, this implicit obligation of a "gift," and the group censure and punishment that occurred when someone refused to comply with this implicit obligation, was probably the most common dynamic within which late transactions could go back and forth, and in our It is also still common to provide informal support to each other. Inheritance and other forms of kinship altruism are the only ones that have been widely practiced according to our modern definition of “gift” (i.e., a gift that imposes no obligations on the recipient). Gift form.

Early Western merchants and missionaries usually regarded the aborigines as an undeveloped race. Sometimes they called their tribute trade "gifts" and trade "gift trading". These behaviors resemble Western children's Christmas and birthday gift exchanges rather than legal and tax obligations between adults. On the one hand, this concept is prejudice, but on the other hand, it also reflects the fact that in the West at that time, legal obligations were written down, but the locals did not have legal documents. Therefore, Westerners often translate the words used by Aboriginal people to describe transaction systems, rights and obligations as "gift". In the 17th century, French colonists in America were scattered around several more populous Indian tribes, to which they often had to pay tribute. Calling these tributes "gifts" was a way for them to save face with the Europeans, who did not feel the need to pay tribute and would view paying tribute as cowardly.

Unfortunately, both Mauss and modern anthropologists have retained this term. (the term implies) that these savages were still childlike and childlike in their innocence, that they were morally superior and would not succumb toOur cold-blooded economic dealings. However, in the West, especially in formal terms in transaction-related laws, a “gift” refers to a transaction without any obligations attached. These matters should be kept in mind when we encounter anthropological discussions of “gift exchange”—a term that anthropologists do not mean in the everyday sense of free or informal gifts. They are referring to the very complex system of rights and obligations involved in wealth transfers. The only form of exchange in prehistoric cultures that resembles a modern gift, in which the gift itself is neither a widely recognized obligation nor intended to impose any obligation on the recipient, is the care given to a child by parents or maternal relatives, and heritage. (The exception to this is where the inheritance of a title itself imposes the responsibilities and privileges of the position on the heir).

Some heirlooms may be interrupted over several generations, but this in itself does not form a closed loop of collection transfer. An heirloom only has value if it can eventually be used for something else. They were often used for in-law transactions between clans, thus creating a closed loop of collectibles.

Family Trade

An important early example of small closed-loop trading networks in collectibles involves the higher investments humans make in raising offspring (compared to our primate relatives) and related The institution of human marriage.

Marriage, a mixture of long-term mating and nurturing arrangements, intertribal negotiations, wealth transfers and other arrangements, is a universal phenomenon among humans and may be as old as Homo sapiens.

Parenting is a long-term investment, but it is almost a one-time deal - there is no time to make repeated choices. From a genetic fitness perspective, divorcing a philandering husband or an unfaithful wife often means several years wasted by the infidel. Loyalty and commitment to children are primarily guaranteed by in-laws (i.e., clan). Marriage is actually a contract between clans, which usually includes such loyalty and commitment, as well as the transfer of wealth.

The contributions made by men and women to marriage are rarely equal; this is especially true in an era when marriage matters are decided by the clan and there are not many clan leaders to choose from. Most commonly, women are considered more valuable, so the groom's clan pays a fee to the bride's clan. In contrast, it is unusual for the bride's family to give money to the groom's family. Basically only the upper class in monogamous and highly unequal societies (such as medieval Europe and India) would do this, and, ultimately, this situation was intensified by the huge potential advantage of upper-class men compared to women. came out. Because most of the literature was written about the upper classes, dowry often has a place in traditional European stories. This does not reflect its ubiquity in human culture – dowry is in fact rare.

Marriages between families can form a closed cycle of collectibles. In fact, as long as the brides wish to exchange collectibles, two clans that have exchanged members can form a closed loop. If a family is richer in collectibles, theyYou can get better brides for your sons (in a monogamous society), or you can get more brides (in a polygamous society). In a cycle involving only marriage, primitive money could replace the family's need for memory and trust, allowing renewable resources to be paid on credit and repaid over a long period of time.

Like inheritance, litigation, and tribute, marriage requires a triple coincidence of events. Without a transferable and durable store of value, the ability of the groom’s family to fulfill the bride’s wishes is unlikely to be satisfactory (this ability also determines the value misalignment between the bride and groom to a large extent. Of course, the marriage must also satisfy matching and romantic needs). One solution is to impose a long-term, ongoing obligation of service on the groom and his family to the bride's family. This scheme occurs in 15% of known cultures. In 67 percent of cases, the groom or his family paid the bride's family a large fortune. Sometimes the bride price was paid with ready-made consumer goods, that is, plants gathered and harvested for the wedding and animals killed for the wedding. In pastoral or agricultural societies, most bride price was paid in livestock (which was also a form of wealth that lasted for a long time). The remainder—and often the most valuable part of the bride price in livestock-free cultures—is usually paid for with the most valuable heirlooms: the rarest, most luxurious, and most durable necklaces, rings, etc. wait. In the West, the groom would give the bride a ring (the suitor would give the woman other forms of jewelry), which was once a substantial transfer of wealth and is common in many other cultures. In about 23% of cultures (mostly modern), there are no large transfers of wealth. 6% of cultures have wealth transfers between men and women. In only 2% of cultures, the bride's family provides a dowry to the couple.

Unfortunately, some wealth transfers are far removed from the altruism of inheritance and the beauty of marriage, such as tribute.

Trophy

In orangutan populations and even hunter-gatherer cultures (and their close relatives), the death rate from violence is much higher than the corresponding value in modern civilization. This situation goes back at least as far as our common ancestor with chimpanzees—orangutan groups have always been at odds with each other.

War involves killing, maiming, torture, kidnapping, rape, and the extortion of tribute with the threat of such a fate. When two neighboring tribes are at peace, one usually has to pay tribute to the other. Tributes can also be used to forge alliances and achieve economies of scale in war. Most of the time, this is a form of exploitation that brings greater benefits to the victor than the infliction of further violence.

Generally speaking, victory in a war is followed by an immediate transfer of value from the loser to the winner. In form, this transfer usually takes the form of massive plundering by the victors and desperate hiding by the defeated. More commonly, the defeated were required to pay regular tribute to the victor. At this time, another triple coincidence problem arises. Sometimes this difficulty can be avoided by complex ways of reconciling the defeater's supply capabilities with the victor's needs. But even so, primitive money offered a superior approach — a recognized medium of value that dramatically simplified payment terms — which was important in an era when terms couldn’t be written down or remembered. In some cases, such as the shells at the Iriquois Confederacy, collectibles also serve as original mementos that, while not as precise as words, can be used to help recall the terms. For the winner, collectibles provide a way to collect tribute as close as possible to Laffer's optimal tax rate. Yes, within a certain range, as the tax rate increases, the tax collected will increase; but beyond a certain level, the tax will actually decrease due to the increase in the tax rate, because people are unwilling to work). For the losers, because the collections can be hidden, they can "underreport their property," allowing the winners to collect less tribute because they don't have that much wealth. Hidden collectibles also provide a form of insurance against greedy predators. Because of this invisibility, much of the wealth of primitive societies escaped the attention of missionaries and anthropologists. Only archaeologists can uncover these hidden treasures.

Hiding collectibles and other strategies present collectible looters with a conundrum faced by modern tax collectors as well - how to estimate the wealth they can extract. While measuring value is a problem in many types of transactions, none is more problematic than hostile taxation and tribute. After making very difficult and unintuitive trade-offs, coupled with a series of visits, audits and collection work, the tribute payer finally maximizes the return, even if this result is very expensive for the tribute payer.

Suppose a tribe wants to collect tribute from several neighboring defeated tribes, they must estimate how much value they can extract from each tribe. Wrong estimation methods will allow some tribes to hide their wealth, while over-exploiting other tribes. As a result, the damaged tribes will gradually shrink, while the benefited tribes can pay relatively less tribute. In all of these situations, the winner has the potential to gain more by using better rules. This is how the Laffer Curve guides tribal wealth.

The Laffer Curve was proposed by the outstanding economist Arthur Laffer to analyze the problem of tax revenue: as tax rates increase, tax revenue will rise, but it will rise slower and slower because there will be more and more tax revenue. increase tax evasion and, most importantly, disincentives to engage in taxed activities. For the above reasons, there is a certain tax rate that maximizes tax revenue. Raising the tax rate above Laffer's optimal rate would actually reduce revenue. Ironically, the Laffer Curve is often used to argue for low tax rates, although it is itself a theory about maximizing tax revenue rather than maximizing social welfare.The theory of taxation that maximizes or maximizes personal satisfaction.

From a long-term perspective, the Laffer Curve may be the most important economic principle in history. Charles Adams used it to explain the rise and fall of dynasties. The most successful are always guided by their own self-interest in maximizing their income according to the Laffer Curve - their interests include both short-term income and the long-term success of others. Countries that imposed excessive taxes, such as the Soviet Union and the late Roman Empire, were eventually lost in history; countries with too low tax rates were often conquered by neighbors who were better at financing. Historically, democracies have often been able to maintain high tax revenues through peaceful means and without launching foreign wars; they were the first in history to have tax revenues so high relative to foreign enemies that they could spend a lot of money on them. Spend in non-military areas; their tax system is closer to the Raffer optimal tax rate than most previous types. (There is also another view that this leisure to spend money is brought about by the deterrent power of nuclear weapons, rather than by the increasing demands of democracy to maximize tax revenue.)

When we apply pull When examining the relative impact of tribute contracts on different tribes using a Frequent curve, we can conclude that the desire to maximize revenue leads the victor to want to accurately calculate the income and wealth of the conquered tribe. The way in which value was measured crucially determined how tribute-payers could evade the burden of tribute by hiding their wealth and fighting or fleeing; there were many ways for tribute-payers to cheat these measures, such as hiding collections in cellars. Collecting tribute is a game centered around value estimation and in which the incentives of both parties are inconsistent.

With collectibles, the victor can demand tribute from the tribute at the (strategically) most appropriate time, without having to accommodate the time available to the tribute or the time the victor needs. With collectibles, the victor can freely choose a time to consume the wealth, instead of having to consume it while accepting tribute.

In 700 BC, trade was already common, and currency was still in the form of collectibles. Although currency was made of precious metals, its basic characteristics (the lack of a unified scale of value) were still unique. Most primitive currencies since the beginning of Homo sapiens are very similar. This situation was changed by the Greek-speaking Lydians who lived in Anatolia (now Turkey). In archaeological and historical records, the Lydian kings were among the first issuers of metal coins.

From then on, giving oneself the monopoly to mint currency, rather than privately minting currency, has become the main method of issuing metal currency. Why isn't private enterprise (such as private banks, who have never been absent from these quasi-market economies) in charge of currency minting? The main reason people raise is that anti-counterfeiting measures can only be enforced. However, they can enforce such measures to protect competing private minters, just as you can ban counterfeit trademarks while using the trademark system.

EstimationCalculating the value of metal currency is much easier than estimating the value of collectibles - transaction fees are much lower. With money, much more trade was possible than with only barter; indeed many types of low-value transactions were possible because, for the first time, the small gains from these transactions were greater than the associated transaction costs. Collectibles are currencies with low circulation velocity and only participate in a small number of high-value transactions; metal currencies have a higher circulation velocity and can assist a large number of low-value transactions.

Given what we have seen about the benefits that primitive money brought to the tribute system and tax collectors, as well as the inevitable value estimation problems in optimizing forced payments, tax collectors (especially Lydy) It would not surprise us that the King of Asia became the first issuer of metal currency. The king's income came from taxes, and he had strong incentives to more accurately estimate the wealth held and exchanged by his subjects. On the other hand, market transactions also benefit from cheaper means of measuring value, which creates a system that is close to an efficient market. For the first time in history, individuals can also participate in large-scale markets; these are beyond the plans of the king. side effect. The greater wealth that came with the market also became a taxable item, and the income the king received from this even exceeded the Laffer curve effect brought about by reducing measurement errors under given tax resources. In other words, more efficient taxation methods, supplemented by more efficient markets, will result in a substantial increase in overall tax revenue. These tax collectors were like gold mines, and the reputation of the Lydian kings Midas, Croesus, and Giges for their wealth endures to this day.

Centuries later, when the Greek king Alexander the Great conquered Egypt, Persia, and much of India, he financed his expeditions by looting Egyptian and Persian temples. Specifically, Take out the low-circulation collectibles hidden in temples and mint them into high-circulation coins. In doing so, he conjured up an efficient economy and a more efficient tax system.

Tribute itself cannot form a closed loop of collectibles. Tributes will have value if and only if the conqueror can exchange the collection for something else (such as in-laws, trade, or collateral). However, the victor can force the defeated into manufacturing to obtain collectibles, even if this is not in line with the defeated's active wishes.

Disputes and Compensation

Ancient hunter-gatherer tribes did not have our modern tort or criminal laws, but they had a similar method of mediating disputes, which was to let the clan or tribal leader , or voting to make decisions covering what modern law calls crimes and torts. Resolving disputes through punishments or fines can prevent disputing clans from falling into a cycle of vendetta. Many pre-modern cultures, from the Iroquois in America to the pre-Christian Germanic peoples, believed in compensation over punishment. From petty theft to rape to murder, all achievable violations have a price (e.g. the Germanic “weregeld” and Iroquois blood Where money can be used, compensation will be paid in money. Animals are also used in pastoral cultures.

Collectibles are also used in lawsuits and similar complaints. to compensate for damage, once again leading us to the triple coincidence of events, supply and need, As in matters of inheritance, marriage and tribute, the judgment must compromise the defendant's ability to pay compensation and the plaintiff's opportunity and desire to benefit from it, even if the compensation is consumer goods that the plaintiff already owns in large quantities. Compensation also constitutes a form of punishment, but may not satisfy the plaintiff - So the cycle of violence cannot be stopped. Here again, we can use collectibles to solve the problem - so that compensation can always resolve disputes and end the cycle of revenge.

If compensation payments can completely eliminate hatred, Then it cannot form a closed loop. However, if the compensation payment cannot completely quell the hatred, then the collection cycle will be followed by a vendetta cycle. Because of this, this system may reach an equilibrium state. Reduce but not eliminate the vendetta cycle until a more connected trading network emerges

Properties of collectibles

Evolved from humans into small, largely self-sufficient and vendetta against each other. Since the dawn of time, the use of collections has reduced the need to record favors and made possible wealth-transfer systems like those we discussed above; for most of our time as a species, these systems solved problems than The throughput issue of barter is far more important. In effect, collectibles provide a fundamental boost to the operation of reciprocal altruism, extending human cooperation beyond the reach of other species for whom reciprocal altruism is strictly limited by their unreliability. Memory. Some other species have large brains, build their own nests, and make and use tools, but no other species has produced such a tool that provides such important support for reciprocal altruism. This new historical process has been

Menger called this first type of money "intermediary goods" - what this article calls it. "Collectibles". Some artifacts that are useful in other scenarios (such as cutting) may also be used as collectibles. However, once the tools related to wealth transfer become valuable, they will only be used as collectibles. To be made. So what do these attributes look like?

For a specific item to be selected as a valuable collectible, it must have the following characteristics: Properties (at least relative to less valuable products):

More secure and less susceptible to accidental loss and theft. For most of history, this property meant. It can be carried around and easily concealed;

Its value attribute is more difficult to forge. An important subset of this attribute is those that are extremely luxurious and rarely seen.Almost impossible to counterfeit, these items are considered extremely valuable for the reasons we have explained above;

It is easier to estimate their actual value through simple observation or measurement. That is to say, more reliable conclusions can be obtained by simple observation, and less effort is required.

Humans everywhere have strong incentives to collect items that better satisfy these attributes. Some of these motivations may come from instincts that have evolved with genes. These objects are collected for the sheer pleasure of collecting (rather than for any explicit or practical reason), and such pleasure is almost universal in human culture. One of the immediate motives was decoration. According to research by Professor Mary C. Stiner of the University of Arizona, "ornament is common among all modern human ancestors." For evolutionary psychologists, this kind of behavior (dressing up, decoration) that has no practical reason other than pleasure can find a good ultimate explanation from the perspective of natural selection: decoration behavior is a candidate material for evolution, and it becomes The pleasure that evolves with genes inspires collecting behavior. If the reasoning of this article is correct, this is why humans have the instinct to collect rare objects, art and especially jewelry.

Point 2 requires further explanation. First, it seems very wasteful to make an item just because it is a luxury item. However, these irreplaceable luxury items can continue to increase in value through the medium of valuable wealth transfer. Every time it moves a transaction from impossible to possible, or from prohibitively expensive to affordable, some of the cost is recovered. Its manufacturing cost is a complete waste at first, but is amortized over time as transactions occur. The monetary value of precious metals is based on this principle. The same goes for collectibles, the rarer and less easily produced the more valuable it is. The same principle applies to products that can be shown to contain highly skilled and unique human labor, such as works of art.

We have never found or made a product that is perfect in all three areas. Artworks and collections (in modern culture) can only satisfy (2), but not (1) and (3). Common beads can only satisfy (1), but not (2) and (3). Jewelry was originally made from the most beautiful and rarest shells, but in most cultures eventually moved to making them from precious metals, which are more balanced in satisfying the three properties. It is no coincidence that precious metal jewelry is often thin (such as necklaces and rings), as such products can be inspected cheaply anywhere. Metal currencies go a step further - small, standardized weights and hallmarks used as a mark of inspection significantly reduce fees in small transactions using precious metals. The currency itself is just another step in the evolution of collectibles.

Mobile art objects (such as small statues) made by Paleolithic humans also fit these attributes. In fact, the things made by humans in the Paleolithic Age were either very practical or useful.Combine the above three attributes.

The artifacts associated with Homo sapiens include some puzzling items: useless or unused flints (such as the unusable Clovis flints mentioned above). Culiffe discusses several hundred pieces of flint from the Mesolithic Europe, all of which were well-made flint blades, but which upon closer analysis revealed that they had never cut anything.

Flint is also very similar to the first type of collectibles, the aforementioned specialized collectibles, just like jewelry. Indeed, the earliest flints may have been produced for their cutting purposes; their added value as a medium for transferring wealth and enabling the institutions mentioned above were all unintended consequences. These institutions, in turn, promoted the creation of specialized collectibles, first flints with no practical use, and then the various jewelry developed by Homo sapiens.

Shell currency from Sumer, 3000 BC

In the Neolithic During this era, in many parts of the Middle East and Europe, some types of jewelry became more standardized—to the point where standard size and assayability were more important than good looks. The quantity of jewelry used in the commercial field sometimes greatly exceeds the quantity of jewelry traditionally stored. This is the intermediate stage from jewelry to metallic currency, with some collectibles increasingly taking the form of interchangeable items. In 7000 B.C., the king of Lydia began issuing metal coins. With a standard weight of precious metals, market entities such as workers and tax collectors can "test" (through the mark on the silver coin) its unforgeable expensive properties, that is, by trusting the reputation of the minter, rather than Just choose any position on the metal coil and cut it to see the quality.

It is no coincidence that collectibles have the same properties as precious metal currencies and the reserve commodities of most physically backed currencies. It's just that money realizes these properties in a purer form than the collectibles used throughout much of human prehistory.

Silver ring and coil currency used by the Sumerians in 2500 BC. Note that the cross-section size is also standard. And most of these items come in standard weights, from 1/12 shekel to 60 shekel. To test the value of a silver ring or coil, you can use weighing and cutting at randomly selected locations. (Courtesy Oriental Institute, University of Chicago)

One of the novelties of the 20th century was the issuance of fiat currencies ("Fiat" means that the currency is not backed by any physical reserves, unlike the gold and silver-based currencies of previous eras. The opposite is true for currency). While fiat currencies perform very well as a medium of exchange, their priceThe value storage function has proven to be very poor. Inflation destroys many people’s piggy bank. This would explain why the market for rare objects and unique works of art has flourished over the past century (because they have the collectible properties described above). One of the most technologically advanced marketplaces of our time, Ebay, is also filled with such primitively economic objects. The market for collectibles has also become larger than ever, although the proportion of our investments in collectibles has become smaller than when they served important evolutionary functions.

Collectibles satisfy our primal impulses while maintaining their age-old role as safe stores of value.

Conclusion

Many types of wealth transfers, whether one-way or two-way, voluntary or forced, face transaction cost problems. In voluntary transactions, both parties gain; gifts that are completely free of obligations are often the product of kinship altruism. These transactions bring value to one or both parties and are no less valuable than manufacturing activities. Tribute brought benefits to the victor; adjudication of the damage done prevented further violence and benefited the victim. Inheritance made humans the first species to pass on wealth to the next generation of relatives. These heirlooms could in turn be used as collateral or means of payment in exchange for goods, food against famine, or in-laws. Whether the fees for accomplishing these wealth transfers—transaction fees—are really low enough for people to successfully transfer value is another question. Collectibles played a pivotal role in the birth of these trades.

Collectibles amplify the capacity of our minds and words as prisoner's dilemma solutions, keeping us from being like all other animals in being unable to cooperate with non-kin by repaying favors after the fact. Reputation mechanisms may suffer from two main problems - they may misremember who did what, and they may miscalculate the value created or the extent of damage caused by the behavior. Within clans (small, close-knit kin groups, or extended families, that are subsets of tribes), our brains are wired to minimize these errors, so public reputations and coercive sanctions can provide powerful Motivation has become the main driving force of the ex post reward model, so that people do not have to be paranoid and hesitant because of their counterparty's ability to cooperate and defect. Neanderthals and Homo sapiens had brains of similar size, and (probably similar in this regard), it's likely that each local clan member followed everyone else's network of favors. Among small kin groups, the use of collections for trade may be rare. Between different clans of a tribe, it is possible to trade collectibles and exchange favors. But among tribes, collectibles completely replaced reputation as the impetus for reciprocity, although violence still played an important role in enforcing rights and became the main obstacle to most transactions.

When something is condensed with something that cannot be counterfeitedEXPENSIVE CONSUMPTION - Glass beads used for trade, made in Venice, 16th or 17th century, unearthed in Mali, Africa. Such beads were popular wherever European colonists encountered Neolithic, or hunter-gatherer, cultures.

To be used as a universal form of wealth storage and wealth transfer tool, a collection must be embedded in at least one system that creates a circulation of the collection so that the costs of discovering and/or manufacturing the collection can be Amortized over multiple transactions. Furthermore, collectibles are much more than just beautiful decorations. It must have several main functional attributes, such as being portable, easy to hide, and embodying unforgeable luxury. Moreover, this luxury attribute is one that the recipient can verify (the verification techniques must be simple enough) – and they will use the same techniques that many collectors still use today.

The theory presented in this article can be achieved by looking for the characteristics/lack of “valuable items” that are often exchanged between cultures, measuring the economic benefits generated from the circulation of valuable items, and observing different cultures (including modern culture) are examined for their preferences for items possessing these characteristics.

With this unprecedented collaborative technology, humans have become the most fearsome predators on earth. They adapted to changing climates, while many of the large animals they hunted were driven into extinction by climate change and human hunting in the Americas, Europe, and Asia. Today, most large animals are afraid of projectiles - this applies only to one type of hunter (human). Clerical error, changed to R96). Cultures that relied more on gathering than hunting also benefited greatly. What followed was a population explosion - Homo sapiens could breed in more places and reach population densities up to ten times that of Neanderthals, even though Homo sapiens had softer bones and no increase in brain size. Much of this improvement came from social institutions based on efficient tools and languages ​​for transferring wealth—trade, marriage, inheritance, tribute, mortgages, and the ability to assess violations and inhibit revenge.

Primitive currency is not our common modern currency. It has some of the functions of modern currency, but in the form of heirlooms, jewelry, and other types of collectibles. Primitive currencies have been used for so long that the desire to explore, collect, make, display, authenticate, keep safe, and trade collectibles with each other has become a common human trait—even an instinct to a certain extent. This human desire to collect can be called the “collecting instinct.” Searching for rare materials (such as shells and teeth) and creating collectibles occupied a considerable amount of ancient humans' time, just as many modern humans have made these activities a habit and devoted a lot of energy. The result of such searching and hammering activities for our ancestors was to give the first reliable expression of value that was very different from practicality, and the precursor to our currency today.