economics прекрасное history сталирасты English
У Неандертальцев был крупнее мозг, сильнее тело, но они были первобытными коммунистами. Кроманьонцы были слабее их, но они были первобытными капиталистами. Как всегда, рыночек порешал. Вымершие неандертальцы — вот до какой исторической черты коммунисты хотят деградировать людей:
fee.org
"In the blockbuster 2015 book Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari pointed out that our species has conducted intergroup trade for tens of thousands of years, but that other species of hominids never did:
“Archaeologists excavating 30,000 year old Sapiens sites in the European heartland occasionally find there seashells from the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts. In all likelihood, these shells got to the continental interior through long-distance trade between different Sapiens bands. Neanderthal sites lack any evidence of such trade. Each group manufactured its own tools from local materials…”
He argues that this is what gave homo sapiens a decisive competitive advantage over our distant cousins, who in some cases actually had bigger brains than us.
However, Harari is not the first to make this argument. In his 2010 book The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, Matt Ridley made and elaborated on the same point and the same argument. Ridley also noted the archaeological evidence of far-flung trade networks among homo sapiens.
Ridley helpfully distinguishes between true trade and the other kinds of reciprocity that occur throughout the animal kingdom:
“I am not talking about swapping favours — any old primate can do that. There is plenty of ‘reciprocity’ in monkeys and apes: you scratch my back and I scratch yours. (…) Such reciprocity is an important human social glue, a source of cooperation and a habit inherited from the animal past that undoubtedly prepared human beings for exchange. But it is not the same thing as exchange. Reciprocity means giving each other the same thing (usually) at different times. Exchange — call it barter or trade if you like — means giving each other different things (usually) at the same time: simultaneously swapping two different objects. In Adam Smith’s words, ‘Give me that which I want, and you shall have this which you want.’”
Inventing inter-band trade was quite an achievement, Ridley remarks, especially given:
“…the homicidal relationships between tribes. Famously, no other species of ape can encounter strangers without trying to kill them, and the instinct still lurks in the human breast. But by 82,000 years ago, human beings had overcome this problem sufficiently to be able to pass Nassarius shells hand to hand 125 miles inland.”
Ridley compares the trade networks of our ancestors to the isolationism of Neanderthal bands:
“This is in striking contrast to the Neanderthals, whose stone tools were virtually always made from raw material available within an hour’s walk of where the tool was used. To me this is a vital clue to why the Neanderthals were still making hand axes, while their African-origin competitors were making ever more types of tool. Without trade, innovation just does not happen. Exchange is to technology as sex is to evolution. It stimulates novelty. The remarkable thing about the moderns of west Asia is not so much the diversity of artefacts as the continual innovation. There is more invention between 80,000 and 20,000 years ago than there had been in the previous million. By today’s standards, it was very slow, but by the standards of Homo erectus it was lightning-fast. And the next ten millennia would see still more innovations: fish hooks, all sorts of implements, domesticated wolves, wheat, figs, sheep, money.”
Neanderthals were individually stronger than us and had bigger brains. They were clever enough to make tools and weapons, to speak, to think conceptually, to create art, and to develop culture. But, they were incapable of trade relations outside the familial band, and that doomed them to many millennia of economic and technological stagnation."