Winds of Change.NET: Why do humans barter?

Why do humans barter?

by Donald Sensing at February 5, 2008 3:53 AM

A better question might be, why do only human beings barter? No other species except chimpanzees, barter and even they barter differently than humans.

Despite the importance of this behavior, little is known about how barter evolved and developed. This [linked] study is the first to examine the circumstances under which chimpanzees, our closest relatives, will exchange one inherently valuable commodity (an apple slice) for another (a grape), which is what early humans must have somehow learned to do. Economists believe that commodity barter is one of the most basic precursors to economic specialization, which we observe in humans but not in other primate species. First of all, the researchers found that chimpanzees often did not spontaneously barter food items, but needed to be trained to engage in commodity barter. Moreover, even after the chimpanzees had been trained to do barters with reliable human trading partners, they were reluctant to engage in extreme deals in which a very good commodity (apple slices) had to be sacrificed in order to get an even more preferred commodity (grapes).

The study's authors pointed out that chimps in the wild do barter services, such as grooming. Bartering means making agreements to exchange services that leave both parties better off than before. But chimps in the wild never barter commodities, or physical objects. Even in the labs, it was difficult to get chimps to barter commdities.

One reason ascribed to the lack of commodity bartering among chimps was that chimp societies never evolved concepts of private property or social rules governing property. While chimps in the wild do possess property, there is no social sanction for what humans call theft. A thieving chimp who succeeds in the theft takes possession of the item and that's that. If the original owner wants it back, he has to steal it back. There is no other chimp to appeal to for redress. Furthermore, a chimp possesses property only when actually in physical possession thereof. Once he drops it from his grasp, it's back "in the wild" and is anyone's to take.

So for human beings to have evolved commodity bartering means that a social sense of property had to preceded it, at least enough for there to be social sanctions against theft and social punishment of a thief. That means that it had to become understood in human societies that someone's property remained his property even if was stored or cached somewhere. (Chimps do not store property.)

That social understanding in turn required a moral sense that could ponder hypothetical possibilities - "what if" scenariois, that is: If someones steals another's property, what shall be done about it? So human beings had to be able to think abstractly about the future. Commodity bartering actually requires this ability anyway because by its nature, exchanging commodities requires the ability to forecast future value. Even the chimps swapping apples for grapes have to do this, although their "event horizon" is mere seconds into the future rather than hours, days or longer. One might argue that the chimps didn't actually forecast future value at all but were driven solely by appetite for a sweet tooth.

Along with a moral code that could abstract into the future, a prototype of what we call case law had to be developed, too, another form of abstraction, this looking backward rather than forward. For a moral code, if not wholly capricious (and thus not a code at all), has to be consistent and rely on precedent. It must be based on common, social assent to an understood standard. We have no problem with this idea, but this system is found in no other species on earth. So why did it develop in humanity?

We are faced with a chicken and egg problem, of course. Did the development of property rights and concepts precede the development of socially-enforced moral codes with abstract reasoning, or vice versa? Or did they grow and reinforce each other together? How dependent were they on the evolution of higher intelligence in the genus homo? And in what way did they precede - or result from - the rudiments of civilization?

One thing seems sure: without systems of commodity bartering, civilization could never moved beyond the most elementary level, if even that could have been developed. For, as the study's authors point out, without bartering there is no specialization of labor. Service bartering does not require enough specialization to make civilization possible.

Measuring by one method, chimps and humans are alike in ~99 percent of our genetic code; measured by another we are 95 percent alike. Either way, the development by humans of commodity bartering, and all the social systems required to support it, make for a difference of results much larger than one or a few percentage points would indicate.

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