IT’S Saturday afternoon at the mall, and worshippers at the shrine of consumerism are out in force. They throng the aisles, queuing at the checkouts and standing in line at the fast food altars. There is a low-level hum of voices, as if in prayer. Tills ring out as they open to receive donations of coins and notes, or the more intangible tithe of credit cards. Every weekend the same ritual is played out across the developed world. Millions of people spend-spend-spending money they often have yet to earn on goods they don’t really need. Is this the apogee of human civilisation?
Hardly. It is becoming increasingly clear that our obsession with material goods is very ancient indeed. Mass consumerism may be a 20th-century invention, but its roots go back to the dawn of humanity. It is arguably the cornerstone of civilisation. Before our ancestors invented writing, before they had laws and cities, before pastoralism and farming, even before the use of metal to make tools, there was trade.
Trade in the necessities of life such as food and simple tools is probably at least as old as our species. But what is really surprising is that our taste for objects with no obvious survival value – trinkets, luxury items and “prestige goods” – also goes way back. Recent finds in Africa suggest that decorative objects were being manufactured and traded more than 100,000 years ago. And some researchers are now proposing that our desire for material objects might have been what launched our ancestors on the long road to modernity.
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Humans are born to trade. And we don’t need shops or money to do it – the heart of commerce is an instinctive talent for what anthropologists call “reciprocity”. This probably evolved as the brains of our hominid ancestors grew and their societies became more complex, allowing individuals to keep a running tally of their interactions with others. Evidence from modern hunter-gatherers leaves little doubt that the exchange of food and favours comes naturally, as does the ability to keep a tab of the credits and debits that accrue as a result. Combine this aptitude for mental book-keeping with even the most basic material culture, and trade inevitably follows.
Barter power
Once trade gets off the ground, the economic benefits quickly make it irresistible. Take the Yir Yoront aboriginals of Cape York in northern Australia. Until the latter part of the 20th century they were true hunter-gatherers with few of the trappings we equate with civilisation, yet they did have a lively trading relationship with their neighbours.
The Yir Yoront formed one link in a chain of exchange that stretched from the coast, where they and other local groups produced stingray barbs for fishing, via a succession of trading partners to a site 400 miles inland where the residents quarried and produced polished stone axes. The relative value of stingray barbs increased in direct proportion to the distance from the sea, while the value of axes increased the further they moved from the quarry. So, simply by exchanging the more highly prized items for the less valuable ones, every individual along the chain could make a profit in the form of barbs and axes, even if he produced neither.
It is a short leap from the Yir Yoront to imagining Stone Age people in regions where certain objects were abundant trading these items in regions where they were scarce. But it doesn’t even require patchily distributed resources to make trade profitable. British economist David Ricardo formulated this idea in 1817 in his law of comparative advantage. In essence, what this says is that it benefits two parties to trade even if both can produce their own barbs and axes, and even if one can produce both more efficiently than the other party. That’s because both good manufacturers and poor ones will be better off concentrating their production on the item they can produce more efficiently and trading these for things they are less efficient at producing. By doing this they will get a better payback for their efforts and everybody gains.
But even if our Stone Age ancestors were exchanging tools, food and other essentials of life in a barter economy, this is a far cry from the shopping mall. Modern consumerism goes way beyond subsistence and utilitarianism to encompass everything from Gucci handbags and BMW convertibles to impressionist paintings and designer “bling”. Clearly, the value of such goods is not inherent but resides in certain intangible qualities that we invest in them. When did humans start attributing such value to objects?
Until recently all the archaeological evidence for the flowering of consumer culture has pointed to a date of around 40,000 years ago. That’s when early modern humans started making increasingly intricate bone and stone tools, carving patterns into rocks and creating representational art such as carved figurines, jewellery and cave paintings. However, as most of these artefacts come from sites in Eurasia – notably a set of 41,000-year-old shell beads from Üçagizli in Turkey – there have been suggestions that this is not the full picture. Discoveries in Africa now seem to confirm this and are pushing the origins of consumerism much further back into human prehistory.
A few years ago, reports began to emerge of discoveries made at the Blombos cave, a site of ancient human habitation 300 kilometres east of Cape Town in South Africa. Christopher Henshilwood from the University of Bergen in Norway and colleagues described finding thousands of pieces of ochre, many of them more than 100,000 years old – before the time that early humans moved out of Africa.
Ochre, a coloured clay that comes in various earthy shades from red to black, does not occur naturally around Blombos and must have been imported from quarries at least 30 kilometres away, either directly by Blombos residents or through trade. It can be used to cure animal hides, but the researchers are convinced the Blombos ochre had a symbolic purpose. For a start, it is predominantly red – any of the other colours available would have done for curing – and the surfaces of the clay have been scraped in a way that indicates they were used to yield pigment for dyes. Henshilwood’s team suspects the dyes were used for ritual cosmetic purposes to colour hides and human skin, just as they still are in the region today.
In 2002, Henshilwood and colleagues dated two particularly impressive pieces of Blombos ochre at 77,000 years old – the middle stone age (Science, vol 295, p 1278). The abstract, cross-hatched designs on these have led some observers to dub them the oldest works of art. Henshilwood is more circumspect, but he points to a growing body of evidence for widespread ochre use in Africa dating back 120,000 years. “The Blombos finds are but a blip in an emerging symbolic ocean that is the middle Stone Age,” he says.
Earlier this year the team announced an even more intriguing discovery from Blombos – 41 beads dating from 76,000 years ago (Science, vol 384, p 404). The beads, which were found in clusters of between 2 and 17, are made from the shells of a tiny mollusc, Nassarius kraussianus, that lived in estuaries 20 kilometres away. These cannot be natural deposits, argue the researchers, as each cluster contains shells of a similar size and colour with consistently placed holes. What’s more, all the beads display a pattern of wear suggesting friction from rubbing against thread, clothes or other beads. There are also traces of red ochre inside the shells. The previous oldest find of beads in Africa dates back to just 45,000 years ago.
And it seems the Blombos people’s taste for decorative items was not an isolated phenomenon. In a presentation at this year’s Paleoanthropology Society meeting in Montreal, Canada, Jessica Thompson of Arizona State University in Tempe described similar findings from a site in the Loiyangalani river valley in Tanzania. Along with ochre pencils and carved bone objects, the researchers found two beads made from ostrich eggshells, along with other eggshell fragments that they believe may represent debris from bead manufacture. Although these objects have not been dated accurately, they were found in association with mid-Stone Age tools, making them at least 45,000 – and possibly 280,000 – years old. Similar beads are still made by Khoisan (Bushman) cultures today. Although there is no evidence of how the ancient beads were used, their modern counterparts are often traded.
Yet another indicator that material culture was taking hold in Africa in the Stone Age comes from a ticklish study of lice, published last year by Mark Stoneking and colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany (Current Biology, vol 13, p 1414). On discovering that the lice that infest our hair are different from the ones that infest our bodies, Stoneking reasoned that body lice probably evolved from hair lice when a new ecological niche – clothing – became available. Finding out when the species diverged would give him a pointer to the origins of clothing.
To do this, he used the molecular clock method, which ticks off seconds of evolutionary time by counting the number of genetic mutations that have arisen in two species since they diverged from a common ancestor. The results pointed to a date of around 75,000 years ago. This suggests an origin for clothing in Africa before our ancestors began their mass migration across the globe. “Clothing could have been a key innovation in allowing our species to move into colder climates,” suggests Stoneking. But some researchers interpret the finding differently. “It’s very likely that the first clothing would have conferred status and attractiveness on the wearer,” says Geoffrey Miller from the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.
So it looks as though our taste for jewellery, art, cosmetics and fashion is much older than we thought. But why did we come to value these objects in the first place? One idea is that it was all about sexual attraction. Miller points out that in many animal species, individuals signal their genetic fitness by showing off with expensive adornments. An ostentatious tail that inhibits flight or a brightly coloured torso that is conspicuous to predators are honest indicators that you are fit enough to shrug off handicaps. In humans, consumer products play a similar role, Miller argues.
Archaeologist Aimee Plourde from the University of California, Los Angeles, takes a similar approach, but shifts the emphasis from sex to prestige. And her analysis suggests an answer to one of the big questions about the origin of civilisation – how our ancestors made the transition from living as egalitarian hunter-gatherers to the materialistic, hierarchical societies we equate with modern civilisation.
Plourde argues that even in egalitarian societies, some people are more successful than others. Among our ancestors, superior skills in areas such as hunting, crafts, environmental knowledge and contact with neighbouring groups would have brought respect, deference and privileged treatment from others – in other words, prestige. And because prestige brings social benefits, people would want to show off their talents. The best way to do this is through material items that are hard to fake. “A good hunter, for instance, could advertise his skills by wearing the tooth of an animal that is elusive or dangerous,” says Plourde. The benefits of prestige would also lead to competition to acquire it. As a result, the value and variety of prestige goods would spiral, and there would be a parallel increase in the complexity of social ranking systems as individual prestige led first to leadership of the group and later to the stratified hierarchies you find in more complex societies.
To test her theory, Plourde has examined archaeological evidence from a pre-Inca civilisation near Lake Titicaca in highland Peru, using social developments within this society, which was primitive until relatively recently, as a model for changes that took place much earlier elsewhere. She reported her findings in July at the Human Behavior and Evolution Society conference in Berlin. The site holds clear archaeological evidence for an increase in social complexity starting around 2000 BC. It is at this point that you find the first examples of prestige goods. Certain individuals are buried with gold and turquoise beads, and one with a gold disc, but at this stage there are no other signs of status differences between people. Then, around 700 years later, the villages of the earlier period are superseded by more sophisticated settlements built around sunken courts. This indicates the emergence of social ranking, says Plourde, and is paralleled by an elaboration in prestige goods, especially decorated stone sculptures and pottery.
Finally, starting around 500 BC, prestige goods become more numerous and variable in quality. Many of the finer items, including feline pelts, exotic feathers and hallucinogens such as San Pedro cactus, were obviously imported from the Amazonian lowlands to the east. Prestige goods like these would have belonged to the “elite of the elite”, says Plourde, and she believes that these exalted people limited access to them by controlling trade routes. “Most of the large sites with civic and ceremonial architecture are in locations that would have been strategic for monitoring the flow of traffic through the valley,” she says.
If Plourde is correct, prestige goods form a direct link between our innate drive for trade and the development of complex, hierarchical societies. They are arguably the first step on the road to modern civilisation, paving the way for agriculture (p 29) and urbanisation (p 32).
We may not be impressed by beads, axes and fishing hooks any more, but their modern equivalents have the same fascination for us. Nobody believes the guy who spends £670,000 on a Bugatti Veyron does so because he needs to travel at 250 mph. We all know he’s buying an exclusive status symbol. But don’t knock it: he’s just being civilised.
