Читать книгу The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves - Matt Ridley, Matt Ridley - Страница 24

Meanwhile, the stream of new technologies gathered pace. From around 45,000 years ago, the people of western Eurasia had progressively revolutionised their toolkit. They struck slim, sharp blades from cylindrical rock ‘cores’ – a trick that produces ten times as much cutting edge as the old way of working, but is far harder to pull off. By 34,000 years ago they were making bone points for spears, and by 26,000 they were making needles. Bone spear throwers, or atlatls – which greatly increase the velocity of javelins – appear by 18,000 years ago. Bows and arrows came soon afterwards. ‘Microburin’ borers were used for drilling the holes in needles and beads. Of course, stone tools would have been only a tiny tip of a technological iceberg, dominated by wood, which has long since rotted away. Antler, ivory and bone were just as important. String, made from plant fibres or leather, was almost certainly in use by then to catch fish and rabbits in nets or snares, and to make bags for carrying things in.

Nor was this virtuosity confined to practicalities. As well as bone and ivory, shells, fossil coral, steatite, jet, lignite, hematite, and pyrite were used to make ornaments and objects. A flute made from the bone of a vulture dates from 35,000 years ago at Hohle Fels and a tiny horse, carved from mammoth ivory and worn smooth by being used as a pendant, dates from 32,000 years ago at Vogelherd – both in Germany. By the time of Sungir, an open-air settlement from 28,000 years ago at a spot near the city of Vladimir, north-east of Moscow, people were being buried in clothes decorated with thousands of laboriously carved ivory beads, and even little wheel-shaped bone ornaments had appeared. At Mezherich, in what is now Ukraine, 18,000 years ago, jewellery made of shells from the Black Sea and amber from the Baltic implied trade over hundreds of miles.

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.

If you are not self-sufficient, but are working for other people, too, then it pays you to spend some time and effort to improve your technology and it pays you to specialise. Suppose, for example, that Adam lives in a grassy steppe where there are herds of reindeer in winter, but some days’ walk away is a coast, where there are fish in summer. He could spend winter hunting, then migrate to the coast to go fishing. But that way he would not only waste time travelling, and probably run a huge risk crossing the territory of another tribe. He would also have to get good at two quite different things.

If, instead, Adam sticks to hunting and then gives some dried meat and reindeer antlers – ideal for fashioning hooks from – to Oz, a coastal fisherman, in exchange for fish, he has achieved the goal of varying his diet in a less tiring or dangerous way. He has also bought an insurance policy. And Oz would be better off, because he could now catch (and spare) more fish. Next Adam realises that instead of giving Oz raw antlers, he can give him pieces of antler already fashioned into hooks. These are easier to transport and fetch a better price in fish. He got the idea when he once went to the trading point and noticed others selling antlers that had already been cut up into easy segments. One day, Oz asks him to make barbed hooks. And Adam suggests that Oz dries or smokes his fish so it lasts longer. Soon Oz brings shells, too, which Adam buys to make jewellery for a young woman he fancies. After a while, depressed by the low price fetched by hooks of even high quality, Adam hits on the idea of tanning some extra hides and bringing those to the trading point, too. Now he finds he is better at making hides than hooks, so he specialises in hides, giving his antlers to somebody from his own tribe in exchange for his hides. And so on, and on and on.

Fanciful, maybe. And no doubt wrong in all sorts of details. But the point is how easy it is to envisage both opportunities for trade among hunter-gatherers – meat for plants, fish for leather, wood for stone, antler for shells – and how easy it is for Stone Age people to discover mutual gains from trade and then to enhance that effect by further specialising and further dividing labour. The extraordinary thing about exchange is that it breeds: the more of it you do, the more of it you can do. And it calls forth innovation.

Which only raises another question: why did economic progress not accelerate towards an industrial revolution there and then? Why was progress so agonisingly slow for so many millennia? The answer, I suspect, lies in the fissile nature of human culture. Human beings have a deep capacity for isolationism, for fragmenting into groups that diverge from each other. In New Guinea, for instance, there are more than 800 languages, some spoken in areas just a few miles across yet as unintelligible to those on either side as French and English. There are still 7,000 languages spoken on earth and the people who speak each one are remarkably resistant to borrowing words, traditions, rituals or tastes from their neighbours. ‘Whereas vertical transmission of cultural traits goes largely unnoticed, horizontal transmission is far more likely to be regarded with suspicion or even indignation,’ say the evolutionary biologists Mark Pagel and Ruth Mace. ‘Cultures, it seems, like to shoot messengers.’ People do their utmost to cut themselves off from the free flow of ideas, technologies and habits, limiting the impact of specialisation and exchange.