Introduction
This is the first of at least two posts on the evolution of
collectibles and money. The goal is to
explore the evolutionary and economic functions of the “ornamental” or
“ceremonial” objects that are so common in the archaeological record. In this
article, we will look broadly and visually at the patterns of evolution of
artifacts, in terms of their material and visual characteristics, of the most common kinds of collectibles -- those
objects that look to our modern eyes like jewelry.
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‘Tomb Nr 7 from Yao Shan showing Jade implements
and their position on or near the body. This display in the Museum gives a good
overview of the multiple Jade pieces and shapes following the deceased Liangzhu
Noble into to afterworld.' (Neolithic China, 3000 BC to 2000 BCE)
This blog post will lay out a profound puzzle: the
ubiquity and importance of artifacts, often called “ornamental”, “decorative”, “ceremonial”,
or “ritual”, the evolutionary function of which the anthropological and
archaeological literature has never successfully explained. We will study the
common instances, and the kinds of artifacts of most general importance across
human cultures and timespans, and the connections between them, rather than
thrilling to the rare and freakish artistry beloved of collectors, museums, and
ethnographers.
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Sungir (in the Russian plain, c. 200 km east of
Moscow): burial with mammoth ivory bracelets and thousands of mammoth ivory
beads, 25000-17000 BC. This is long
before the Neolithic (early agriculture era; the people represented in these
burials were mammoth hunters. http://archaeology.about.com/od/sterms/g/sungir.htm. Randall White estimates that an individual
bead took one to two hours of work, and as a result that the grave goods in
such a burial represented nearly 10,000 hours of labor. [7] “Each of the three intact individuals
was lavishly decorated with thousands of painstakingly prepared ivory beads
arranged in dozens of strands... The man was adorned with 2,936 beads…” http://www.donsmaps.com/sungaea.html
To describe my solution to these puzzles, in future posts
I will elucidate updated versions of the theories laid out
on the evolutionary functions of these objects[1]. These theories are not
about how people in these cultures perceived or thought about their axes and
shells and their uses, much less about the interpretations and explanations
given in the accounts of travelers and missionaries, and in the ethnographic
literature. These varied widely, both in how the natives themselves interpreted
their thoughts and actions and how the various observers who recorded these thoughts
and actions further interpreted them. Understanding the thoughts and feelings
of people in such an alien culture is usually extremely difficult at best. Trying
to get in the heads of people from long-extinct cultures is a futile exercise. Our
account will rather be about the evolutionary function of these objects and
their uses, which was typically unconscious, but which we can infer from
archaeological facts, objective aspects of ethnographic observations, and
general evolutionary and economic principles appropriately adapted. We talk in short in terms of ultimate rather than proximate explanations [14]: what were
the consequences in terms of Darwinian fitness for the non-concrete uses of
collectibles?
Artifacts as Wealth
There were a
wide variety of objects that at one time or another could have served as to a
greater or lesser extent as stores and displays of wealth, and to a greater or
lesser extent media for the satisfaction of obligations and units of account.
(I will describe what I mean by “media of obligation satisfaction” in future
posts; for now it is sufficient to say that it is a generalization of the
economic idea of “medium of exchange” to include a wide variety of non-exchange
transactions that transfer wealth).
The
manufacture and use of shell beads is more than 100,000 years old, and possibly
dates to the earliest millennia of homo
sapiens. The use of “ritual” blades and points
may be even older, predating our species. The general pattern of artifacts in
general and collectibles in particular in terms of their abilities to store,
display, or transfer wealth can be diagrammed as follows:
At the extreme upper left-hand corner is modern money – used
purely as a medium of exchange and obligation satisfaction, and with high
velocity, typically several transactions per month. The predominant such media in a culture also
usually becomes its of account. At the opposite (southeast) extreme are pure
stores of value – seldom if ever alienated, they usually change ownership only
at death. At the northeast extreme are
pure collectibles – a low-velocity (a few to a few dozen transfers per human
lifetime) medium of obligation satisfaction and exchange, but also a store and
display of wealth. At the southwest
extremely are immediate consumables, such as food obtained from foraging in
cultures that do not preserve or store their food.
“Media for the satisfaction of obligations” is a
generalization of the idea from modern monetary theory that money serves as a media of
exchange. The kinds of obligations that might be satisfied over the course of human evolution are far broader and deeper than just exchange, which was probably far from the most important kind of wealth transfer during the Paleolithic. “Unit of account” is any
measure or count that people in a society used as a general (across multiples
goods and services) proxy measure of value.
As for display of wealth, according to the theory of this
series this was the main function of ornamentation, and is derivative from the
function of these objects as stores of wealth. In a future post we will discuss
more about what is meant by this terminology.
The correlations between media for the satisfaction of obligations
and units of account, and between stores and displays of wealth, largely holds
true for Paleolithic and Neolithic times when functions were condensed that are
now quite distinct . In more recent times there has been a strong divergence
between stores of wealth and displays of wealth (e.g. stocks and bonds vs.
jewelry).
Most of the durable artifacts that archaeologists dig up
from the Paleolithic through Bronze Ages, including the early civilizations of
Mesopotamia, lived a mixed life – they were concretely useful objects and
low-velocity media of fitness-benefiting transactions and stores and
displays of wealth, to varying degrees, but seldom if ever used as just any one
of these. They condensed multiple
functions that we now consider separate and often unrelated, as discussed
further below.
It is important to keep in mind two very large selection
biases at work in archaeology. The first
is that apart from some exceptional environments (e.g. peat bogs) that preserve
organic material, only durable objects survive to be dug up by the
archaeologist. This means that an
artifact is more likely to be a collectible than the typical artifact in the
culture (which quite preponderantly would have been organic materials for
concrete use that have not survived). The second selection bias is that nearly
all collectors and museums, and most archaeologists, are heavily biased towards
collecting objects that more resemble unique artworks than they are interested
in collecting or studying repetitive and boring objects. Overcoming this bias can result in
substantial breakthroughs in understanding a culture. For example Denise Schmidt-Besserant discovered the origins of writing in Mesopotamia by focusing on repetitive and unartful clay
tokens that had been ignored by collectors and ther archaeologists.
In addition to the two general selection effects above,
another selection effect particularly impacts metals. That is that metals, especially precious
metals but even baser metals such as copper and bronze, were recycled very
efficiently. Metallic artifacts we find in archaeological digs are likely to be
particularly unrepresentative of the metallic artifacts most commonly used in a
society. For money in particular, unless
they were unique artworks of particular attraction to collectors, an earlier form of
metallic money has with very high probability been recycled into a later form
of metallic money, or into some other metal object, the result being that the
earlier forms are highly underrepresented in the archaeological record.
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Some Basic Patterns
of Collectibles
Three of the most important patterns of collectibles that
have been discovered in this research are condensation,
authority resemblance, and unforgeable
costliness. In the former two cases these patterns are broadly applicable
to artifacts in general. Taking these in turn:
1. Condensation -- generally
speaking, the farther back we go in
time, the lesser the degree of specialization (division of labor) and thus
differentiation of technology exists. Furthermore, the weight and bulk of
artifacts per family was much lower in Neolithic society, with its much higher
transport costs, than today. In Paleolithic forager societies, which were
typically mobile, belongings had to be carried on the person, resulting in a
still radically lower weight or volume of goods controlled by a person or clan.
This results as we go back in time in condensation:
a given object tends to serve a greater variety of functions: it condenses the functions we consider or
take for granted today as separate and often unrelated functions.
Obtaining fitness benefits by the
widest variety of available means within a society with a radically smaller
division of labor and differentiation of technology. Thus institutions usually
condensed the functions of religion with business, business with politics and
war, law with lore, tort law with criminal law, ceremony with accounting, and
gang warfare with a substantial body of customary rules. Objects could condense
the functions of jewelry with coinage, and concrete utility with media of
obligation satisfaction and store of value.
From our point of view functions in earlier periods are
increasingly condensed, and in Neolithic times were very highly condensed, and
in Paleolithic times were radically condensed: a typical object tended to serve
many more purposes in the early Paleolithic than in the late Paleolithic, less
still in the Neolithic, and less still after the dawn of state-like
agricultural societies. Contrariwise the general trend of economic development
over millennia, and between stages of the Paleolithic and Neolithic, is differentiation. Missionaries,
travellers, and ethnographic observers, as well as their readers, often
committed the fallacy of exclusion – concluding that because an
object was used for one thing, that it was not used for another thing in what
we consider to be a separate sphere of activity.
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Detail from the Giant Bible of Mainz, handwritten in the traditional way around the same time as Gutenberg produced the
first printed Bible. [source]
2. Authority resemblance
– Initial forms of innovative artifacts, of a kind the value of which was based
at least in part on their authority, often borrowed authority from what they
were replacing by physical resemblance. Mimicry of or semblance to pre-existing
authoritative forms in a new medium was and is a very common feature of
innovations: examples range from Gutenberg’s printing press mimicking scribal
script to the private overnight parcel service Federal Express alluding
by name and color scheme to the United States Postal Service. The ritualistic airstrips, offices, military drills, etc. of cargo cults were an extreme example of
authority resemblance, and it predominates in the design of national flags and many other symbols (such
as commercial brands) that invoke reputation or authority. Where not tabooed or
banned as counterfeiting or trademark violation, authority resemblance was and
is a common feature of innovative collectibles, their form invoking a traditional authoratative form while pioneering a new media.
The histories of art and architecture in religion, politics,
finance, and business are replete with examples of authority resemblance. The designs of many of the very
earliest coins, which differ greatly from the standard and presumably optimal form they soon converged on and have retained ever since, highlights what existing objects they were inspired by and suggests a similarity in intended role and function between the novel object and the old object whose form it has taken on. We will see in this and future posts that the earliest coins borrowed their form from shells, beads, and the
metal blades of tools.
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Detail of necklace from a burial at Sungir, Russia, 28,000 BP.
Interlocking and interchangeable beads. Each mammoth ivory bead may have required
one to two hours of labor to manufacture. [9]
3. Unforgeable
costliness – a wide variety of objects, which we call collectibles, have as a necessary component and a secure costliness
– either in search costs of collection, in manufacturing costs, or both – that
serves to constraint its supply curve.
This is true for collectibles as media of obligation satisfaction as
well as collectibles as stores and displays of wealth.
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Efficient symbolic communication – Mesolithic
cave painting -- abundant surface and easily made pigments. Much information. [Source]
Many of the artifacts called here collectibles, especially
Paleolithic and Neolithic beads, have been assumed by archaeologists to be
primarily “ornamental” and serve a “symbolic” function, i.e. are said to have
been “information technology”[6]. If an artifact were purely symbolic (e.g. a
clay tablet impressed with accounting
records) we would expect symbol efficiency to be high given the available
materials (e.g. clay) and technologies (e.g. symbols for words). But with
collectibles, people went out of their way to choose costly goods and undertake
costly methods of manufacture – collectibles such as beads typically had an
extremely poor symbol efficiency compared to the available alternatives. They must have had functions that were much more than symbolic, leading to competing
requirements that we must elucidate.
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Efficient symbolic communication – already
existing and otherwise useful flint painted with symbols (c. 5000 BC) [Source]
As we will see below, beads of shell, bone, and similar
objects were made, strung, and worn for tens of millennia in the vast majority
of Upper Paleolithic and Neolithic cultures.
Gratuitous use of costly beads over tens of millennia would have been
weeded out by Darwinian genetic selection. Beads, used as actually observed either
in Epipaleolithic or Neolithic burials or as observed in the few recently
observed such cultures, are not, in contrast to spoken human language and every other information-rich symbolic system, used in any way remotely approaching the
efficient coding scheme that would have emerged from natural selection if pure
symbolism were their main evolutionary function. Beads that are arranged in a pleasing regular
pattern, as they typically are, carry very little information – they are
extremely inefficient in terms of information per unit of weight or volume and
especially per cost of collection and manufacture. Since forager bands were
typically mobile they had even more compelling evolutionary pressure to improve
the symbol efficiency of their media, by evolving choices and designs for the most
efficient available such media, if such recorded communication was an
evolutionary important (and evolutionarily accessible) problem. Instead, vocal
communications were far more useful for mobile forager bands and underwent the
radical and unique evolution of human spoken language, while remains of recorded
symbolic communications are sparse and rare.
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Efficient communication –
painted pebbles (Norwegian Mesolithic, c. 11,000 BP)
Not only were beads of multiple varieties almost always
strung together in regular patterns that did not take advantage of the coding
capabilities of the multiple varieties, but the most common bead pattern was
repeating the same kind of bead over and over again, which carries no
information whatsoever in the arrangement of the beads. The digital nature of
shell beads makes this a tempting theory in our society so saturated by
computer screens and codes, but it is wrong.
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Cost-effective
communication – pictures, pictograms and counting symbols in abundant clay
(Transylvania, 5500-5300 BC)
What would have efficient symbolic coding of bead patterns
look like if contrary to the observed facts it had evolved? If there are, for
example, 16 different roles (what we would call “offices”) in a clan (elder,
shaman, etc.), and there is evolutionary benefit (e.g. in minimizing disputes) to
representing title to those positions in permanent form, one does not need a
long string of beads. A clan only needs
16 different objects, each representing a different office. If the clan has only 2 different kinds of
objects available, they still only 4 of them (2^4 = 16 bits of information). There are a wide variety of coding schemes in
between that would be this efficient or nearly so. But no such efficient scheme, or any scheme
anywhere nearly as efficient as such a scheme, using beads has ever been
observed in widespread use in a Paleolithic or Neolithic culture: neither in
contemporarily observed instances of such cultures nor in the archaeological
record.
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Wasteful as symbolic communication – regular
pattern (little information) and made of costly beads, as well as taking much
additional labor to assemble from the beads.
Wampum, Museum of Ontario Archaeology. [Source]
If Paleolithic and Neolithic beads had been as extremely
cheap as mass-manufactured beads are today, and transportation and storage
costs had been those of today, the extremely poor symbolic efficiency of how
beads were used might be taken to not have mattered so much. But beads were very costly to make and in a
mobile forager society were costly to bring with. An example of how beads were
far too costly for purely symbolic communications is provided by the cost
analysis done on beads found in the Sungir Burials of the 29,000-15,000 BP
epoch. Randall White estimates that an individual bead took one to two hours of
work, and as a result that the grave goods in such a burial represented nearly
10,000 hours of labor. [7]
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QR codes are a great way for computers to read a label printed by another computer and affixed to a movable object, but a terrible technique for human-to-human
communications, especially if as with shell beads each “pixel” had cost an hour
or more of human labor to make.
So while beads could have been and sometimes were used for
symbolic purposes, this could not have been their primary evolutionary function
– symbolic aspects of their use would have been very secondary. A similar
analysis applies to most other kinds of collectibles, such as “ceremonial”
blades and points (most commonly axes). Unforgeable costliness – the secure
supply curve of these objects relative to the much more common objects in the
environment that were not used as collectibles – strongly suggests that these
collectibles had some function very important to Darwinian fitness related to
wealth. What that function was has been explored in [1] which I hope to
elaborate on in future post(s).
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Regular pattern of costly beads. Wampum, British
Museum. [Source]
In some broad sense of the term any display of wealth is “symbolic”,
especially when its design invokes the reputation or authority of prior
displays of wealth. Thus the commonality of authority resemblance in the design
of paper money, coins, and jewelry, repeated tropes such as gold foil and
expensive ultramarine blue pigments in medieval and Renaissance European art,
etc. But it is the ability of the medium to serve as a secure store and display
of wealth that is doing the heavy lifting here, not its ability to efficiently
convey information.
When costliness becomes insecure, and authority resemblance
comes to predominate over genuine scarcity, we can get counterfeiting crises
that disrupt the culture relying on the old form of collectible. The first craftsmen to pound copper and gold
flat and apply it to surfaces could make far more surface look lavish than was
possible with solid copper or gold. Such a counterfeiting crisis would have
produced a kind of inflation broader than monetary inflation: a change in
expectations about wealth securely displayed as well as wealth securely stored
in an object. To the extent imitation cowrie shells (see below) could be made
out of materials much cheaper than the genuine cowrie (e.g. stone) it could
produce such inflation. Trade beads were colonial examples: mass-produced
beads that were supernormal models of shell beads shiny from wear, usurping
their authority, while being cheaply mass produced, undermining the previously
unforgeable costliness of beads.
Attributes
of Collectibles
What attributes are we looking for in
media of obligation satisfaction, units of account, and in stores and displays
of wealth? "Shelling Out: The Origins of Money" argued, and future posts will argue, that
[C]ollectibles
provided a fundamental improvement to the workings of reciprocal altruism,
allowing humans to cooperate in ways unavailable to other species. For them,
reciprocal altruism is severely limited by unreliable memory. Some other
species have large brains, build their own homes, or make and use tools. No
other species has produced such an improvement to the workings of reciprocal
altruism.
[Economist Karl]
Menger called this first money an "intermediate commodity" -- what
this paper calls collectibles. An artifact useful for other things, such as
cutting, could also be used as a collectible. However, once institutions
involving wealth transfer became valuable, collectibles would be manufactured
just for their collectible properties. What are these properties? For a
particular commodity to be chosen as a valuable collectible, it would have had,
relative to products less valuable as collectibles, at least the following
desirable qualities:
(1)
More secure from accidental loss and theft. For most of history this meant it could be
carried on the person and easy to hide.
(2)
Harder to forge its value. An
important subset of these are products that are unforgeably costly, and therefore
considered valuable…
(3)
This value was more accurately approximated by simple observations or
measurements. These observations would have had more reliable integrity yet
have been less expensive.
Humans
across the world are strongly motivated to collect items that better satisfy
these properties. Some of this motivation probably includes genetically evolved
instincts. Such objects are collected for the sheer pleasure of collecting them
(not for any particularly good explicit and proximate reasons), and such
pleasure is nearly universal across human cultures. One of the immediate
proximate motivations is decoration. According to Dr. Mary C. Stiner, an
archaeologist at the University of Arizona, "Ornamentation is universal
among all modern human foragers." [W02] For an evolutionary psychologist,
such a behavior that has a good ultimate explanation, in terms of natural
selection, but has no proximate rationale other than pleasure, is a prime
candidate to be a genetically evolved pleasure that motivates the behavior.
Such is, if the reasoning in this essay is correct, the human instinct to
collect rare items, art, and especially jewelry.
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“Miniature Bi disc”,
jade, from the late Neolithic to Bronze Ages, c. 3000-2000 BCE, diameter
1.25" to 2” [Source]
The
kind of mobile art made by Paleolithic humans, (small figurines and the
like) also matches these characteristics well. Indeed, Paleolithic peoples made
very few objects that were not either utilitarian, or shared characteristics
(1)-(3). There are many puzzling instances of useless or at least unused flints
with homo sapiens…Cunliffe [C94] discusses a European Mesolithic era
find of hundreds of flints, carefully crafted, but which micrograph analysis
reveals were never used for cutting.
Flints
were quite likely the first collectibles, preceding special-purpose
collectibles like jewelry. Indeed, the first flint collectibles would have been
made for their cutting utility. Their added value as a medium of wealth
transfer was a fortuitous side effect that enabled the institutions described
in this article to blossom. These institutions, in turn, would have motivated
the manufacture of special-purpose collectibles, at first flints that need have
no actual use as cutting tools, then the wide variety of other kinds of
collectibles that were developed by homo sapiens.
It is no coincidence
that the attributes of collectibles are shared with precious metals, coins, and
the reserve commodities that have backed most non-fiat currencies. Money proper
implemented these properties a purer form than the collectibles used during
almost all of human prehistory.
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Grave goods from Longshan or Liangzhu cultures (China,
3000 to 2000 BCE) [Source]
Due to endemic violence, high transaction costs, and the
extremely low division of labor compared to later economies, there was nothing
resembling modern efficient spot markets in Paleolithic or most Neolithic
societies. As a result, classical
accounts of the origins of money like those of Smith, Menger, et. al. cannot be used as a
theory or guide to the actual historical origins of money without extremely
heavy modification.
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Rare and lovingly worked shell collectibles
being displayed for transfer at a bride price ceremony in Papua New Guinea (20th
century) [Source]
The Snail Standard
Collectibles, even pure collectibles, have an extremely
ancient heritage that must have put them under prolonged evolutionary selection:
cultural (memetic[2]) selection most obviously, but as we shall see, possibly
also genetic selection for a hankering to collect certain kinds of objects for
display and accumulation, not just for food. An evolutionarily gratuitous
practice of such substantial cost would have soon died out, but collectibles
with the traits listed above have been a nearly ubiquitous and important part
of human cultures for many tens of millennia and in all parts of the planet to
which humans have spread.
The Upper Paleolithic period, as the tail end of the most
recent Ice Age, featured climates mostly cooler than today and sea levels that
were many tens of meters lower than they are today. The vast majority of seaside communities of
that epoch now lie submerged under fathoms of ocean and are usually
prohibitively costly for archaeologists to try to find.
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Consistent form: Nassarius gibbosulus shells beads in varied stages of use-wear,
from Üçağızli
Cave I in Turkey. Shell beads generally
get shinier with wear. [6]
One exception to this submersion is the set of Üçağızli
caves along the thin stretch of Turkish coast that sits in front of Syria. The
approach to the coast there is quite steep. As a result, even though the caves
are still above sea level today, and were thus 60-80 meters above sea level in
the Upper Paleolithic, they lie a short (but steep) walk of probably around 1
kilometer from that era’s shoreline.
The inhabitants of these caves lived in a climate that was
more like that of today’s Baltic Sea region than of today’s Mediterranean. They feasted both on land animals such as
deer and on marine resources, a mix that trended from land resources to a mix
of land and marine resources over the period recorded in the archaeological
layers. These people walked the shore not just in search of food, but also in
search of a very specific set of uncommon yet authoritative objects – shells of
the sea snail Nassarius gibbosulus. Once
collected they were selected for size and intactness, and laboriously
perforated. They were then strung onto cords,
presumably as necklaces, bracelets, or belts, or sewn onto clothes, as beads
would appear in later Paleolithic burials.
Extensive cord-wear exists on most of the beads.
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Consistent
size distributions of Üçağızli Cave I beads by culture period from 41,000
BP (start of Initial Upper Paleolithic) to 29,000 BP (end of Epipaleolithic) [6]
Upper Paleolithic shell bead manufacturers were very selective of which size and shape of shells they chose to turn into beads: the resulting beads had “great consistency…of size and shape” compared to the natural biotic distribution of the shells. Most variation in shell species, shape, and size was eliminated during manufacture. They were as similar in size, shape, and weight as it was possible for a collectable set of natural objects in that environment to be. According to Stiner et. al.:
Something about the basket-shaped forms in particular
– their resemblance to something else or just their geometry – held the
interests of people over very long stretches of time. It is difficult to argue
that continuity in species and forms across such vast stretches of time and
space reflects cultural affinity or continuity, particularly in the case of
beautiful natural objects. While
preferred shell forms stayed much the same, other aspects of culture varied a
great deal.[6]
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Severe conservatism
of shells selected for use as beads at Üçağızli
from
c. 41,000 BP (layer I) to 29,000 BP (layer EPI) – time goes from bottom to top.
Relative frequencies of Columbella, Nassarius, Dentalium, Gibbula, and other
taxa used as shell beads. There was during
this long period a very strong preference for the “basket-shaped” shells of the
most typical size of Columbella and Nassarius over the many other and more
common shapes and sizes of shells across the Mediterranean. [6]
Besides a consistent form, the beads were also manufactured in a supply that was very stable across the more than ten millennia recorded in the Üçağızli caves. The diet changed – at the beginning of this timespan consisting almost entirely of land resources, at the end in a mix of land and marine resources -- but the shell bead supply remained remarkably steady.
Consider that objects constituting an efficient medium for
the satisfaction of obligations among forager peoples would satisfy two main
criteria:
1. They must be common and consistent enough to find or make a sufficient number of fungible instances to allow divisibility, and
2. They must be rare enough or costly enough to make to constitute substantial wealth with low bulk and weight, and must fit snugly enough together when strung and worn, that they do not overburden the mobile forgers who carry them around when changing campsites (as they often did).
These hard-to-find shells of Nassarius and Columbella were the objects in the Mediterranean
forager environments that best satisfied these criteria. Incorporating as they did unforgeable
costliness, they would have also made splendid stores and displays of
wealth. In any of these roles, they were
a pure collectible. The snail shell standard was far from arbitrary.
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Consistent supply: abundance of beads (“ornaments”)
vs. vertebrates (typically edible land animals) and edible shellfish (“shellfish”)
found in the successive Üçağızli layers 41,000-29,000 BP.[6]
The use of N.
gibbosulus shells as beads goes back much further in time than the 41,000
BP starting point of this study of Üçağızli. The earliest evidence
of this shell standard is dated from between 100,000 and 135,000 BP at Skuhl in
Israel, and similarly old beads were found in Algeria. The institution prevailed for many tens of
thousands of years across most of the length of the Mediterranean[11]. It was
not until the Epipaleolithic that there was even the slightest trace of
Schumpeterian “creative destruction” in this institution.
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“Money Cowry; Length 2.6 cm; Palou Tello, Batu
Islands, Indonesia.” [Source]
Cowries
Cowry shells are among the most widely
distributed objects found in Eurasian Neolithic archaeology[8]. Peng and Zhu [2]
use the archaeological record to trace an early Bronze Age “Cowrie Road” roughly
following the arc of the later Silk Road across the mid-Eurasian steppes from
the Red Sea (where the species used probably lived) to what is now modern
China. The lack of thick forests or
fixed agriculture made the region relatively easy for merchants and other
travellers to traverse.
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Finds of cowries originating from the Red Sea (off the map
to the left), during the middle and late Shang Dynasty, c. 1400-1040 BC. This general West-to-East movement would be
repeated in much later times by a largely ship-borne movement of silver. [2]
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| Authority resemblance: bronze cowries (Shang dynasty (商代) 1600-1046 BC) [Source] |
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| "Ant-nose” coins (Eastern Zhou 770 to 221 BC) [Source] |
Cowries are also recorded in historical times as being used as money, for example in parts of China. The cowrie shell symbol 貝 is used as a component to write several Chinese words [5] associated with the transfer of value, including
則 (rule,
law, regulation) – a cowrie and a knife – possibly referring to the two main
kinds of legal remedies (money and punishment), which I hope to explore in
depth in future posts
買 (buy,
purchase) – a net over a cowrie (cowrie in a pouch?)
Exchange rates between cowries and coins existed in at least
India, Bengal, and Siam.
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Obverse and reverse of a Ban Liang coin from the
Western Han Dynasty (206 BC – 204 AD).
Like beads, they were strung on strings.
These “strings of cash” were the most common form of payment in China
until colonial times. [Source]
Authority resemblance, the mimicry of pre-existing
authoritative forms in a new medium, is as described above a very common
feature of innovation. The earliest electrum coins invented near the Turkish coast appear, like the
Chinese bronze cowries and “ ant-nose” coins (so named by a much later
numismatist), to purposefully resemble pre-existing shell collectibles[13]. This suggests that the earliest coins were
intended to be authoritative for uses similar to what cowries in China and electrum
beads in Anatolia, respectively, were already being used for.
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Electrum beads in the form of cowrie shells,
from a burial in Middle Kingdom Egypt. Yet another likely case of authority
resemblance. [Source]
Shininess and other aesthetically desired characteristics could have served as proxy measures of scarcity during the long periods of the shell standards in the Upper Paleolithic, and these continue to be attractive attributes of jewelry to this day.
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Conclusion
It was once argued that the eye could not have evolved, for
what use is half an eye, much less a quarter of an eye and so forth? Richard Dawkins called this “argument from
lack of imagination.” It is hard to
imagine objects much less functional than those we are familiar with as being
useful at all. But even one light-sensing cell can be useful in telling the
difference between night and day, which in some environments can be strongly
correlated with the availability of food or protection from predators. Starting
from that most rudimentary (yet useful in itself) of functions, there are a
wide variety of useful steps to the sophisticated eyes of animals today. [4]
Similarly with the artifacts of archaeology, sometimes objects far less
functional than the ones we take for granted could have been evolutionarily
crucial to humans dating back at least to the Middle Paleolithic.
 |
A wide variety of artifacts have served to store, display,
and transfer wealth in a wide variety of ways, ranging from unique artworks and
heirlooms as we now understand them, to money as we now understand it
(typically official government currencies, the modern legal definition of
money), to a wide variety of forms and uses in between, most of which we no
longer know about or have a difficult time understanding. Where artifacts are present in burials, they
are most commonly these artifacts of wealth – these collectibles -- rather than
concretely useful tools. They are also common in the remainder of the
archaeological record dating back many tens of millennia, strongly suggesting
an important evolutionary function. During
Upper Paleolithic times shell beads were manufactured in standard forms with a tradition so rigid that these forms existed largely unchanged for many thousands of years.
 |
Stocks and bonds, futures and derivatives, the kind of money we are familiar with (coins, paper money, digital money, etc.), high art, and most other artifacts of wealth as we understand them did not exist in Paleolithic times, and even in Neolithic times, when some artifacts more closely approached these ideals, they were still far less developed and specialized than today. We are not talking about the highly evolved forms of collectibles, quite the opposite – we are talking about the most rudimentary of function, which nevertheless is quite a bit better than nothing (which is what other animals have when it comes to collectibles). I described what such function is here and will be elaborating these theories and demonstrating them further in future publications.
 |
| Early electrum coins of the “Ionian-A” or Ephesian type, in what is now Turkey, c. 625-575 BC. [Source] |
 |
| Early electrum coins of the “Ionian-A” or Ephesian type, in what is now Turkey, c. 625-575 BC. [Source] |
Of the wide variety of artifacts that had no concrete use,
but which archaeologists tend to dub “ornamental” or “ceremonial”, most types
were idiosyncratic to particular cultures. But two types were widely spread in
time and space: beads of shell or bone were ubiquitous in Paleolithic and
Neolithic cultures, while “ornamental” blades and points were widely popular in
the Neolithic and possibly much further back in time.
In both cases where coins were invented – along the coast of
Turkey and in parts of China – many early coins resembled shell beads in
probable cases of authority resemblance. Prior to the invention of coinage many
metal beads had also been shaped in forms resembling shell beads. Before the
widespread use of coinage, the artifacts we now see as jewelry likely also
often condensed a function similar to early coinage.
 |
| Early electrum coins of the “Ionian-B” or Milesian type. in what is now Turkey, c. 625-575 BC [Source] |
 |
Early electrum coins of the “Ionian-B” or
Milesian type. in what is now Turkey, c. 625-575 BC [Source]
Beads of shell and bone dominate the artifacts that look to
us like ornaments in the archaeological record from its invention in the early
years of homo sapiens to late
Neolithic times, and were still very influential when coins were invented. Contrary
to a currently popular archaeological theory, the main use of these shell beads
was not as “information technology” or the visual convenience of symbolic
information via different combinations of shell beads. Other materials
available in forager environments and other techniques foragers could use were
much better suited to cost-efficient symbolic communications. Instead what
coins and jewelry, at least as far back as the very conservative shell bead
traditions of the Upper Paleolithic, have in common, in sharp contrast to
cost-efficient symbolic systems, is unforgeable costliness, which securely
constrained the supply curve of these goods.
This economic security feature strongly suggests functions related to
wealth and the fitness benefits of wealth. What these functions more
specifically were, in terms of genetic evolution and certain models from
economics applied to that evolutionary framework, will be the subject of
subsequent post(s) in this series.
Acknowledgements
My thanks to Colin Hardwick and Elaine Ou, among others, for
their help with research and/or editing.
References
[1] Szabo,
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Road” from the Red Sea across the Eurasian Steppes.
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Blind Watchmaker
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