The Rational Optimist_ How Prosperity Evolves - Matt Ridley [42]
That trade began as a bilateral and personal affair seems plausible. In the nineteenth century among the Yir Yoront aborigines, in northern Australia, each man’s family camp had at least one highly valued stone axe. The axes all came from a quarry jealously guarded and systematically worked by the Kalkadoon tribe at Mount Isa, 400 miles to the south, far beyond the Yir Yoront lands, and they passed through the hands of many trading partners to reach the tribe. Each older man had a trading partner to the south whom he met once a year in the dry season at a ceremonial gathering. In exchange for a dozen sting-ray barbs, to be used as spear tips, he received an axe. In turn he had obtained some of the barbs from his other trading partner to the north – to whom he gave an axe in return. Another 150 miles to the south, the exchange rate was different: one axe for one barb. There were arbitrage profits all along the chain.
So perhaps the first steps to trade with strangers began as individual friendships. A woman could trust her daughter who had married into an allied band within the same tribal grouping. Then perhaps the woman’s husband could learn to trust his son-in-law. The alliance between the bands in the face of a common enemy allowed the barrier of suspicion to be breached long enough for one to discover that the other had a surplus of stone for making axes, or of sting-ray barbs for making spear tips. Gradually, step by step, the habit of trade began to grow alongside the habit of xenophobia, complicating the ambitions of men and women.
Most people assume that long-distance trade among strangers and the very concept of the market was a comparatively late development in human history, coming long after agriculture. But, as the Australian aborigines suggest, this is bunk. There is no known human tribe that does not trade. Western explorers, from Christopher Columbus to Captain Cook, ran into many confusions and misunderstandings when they made first contact with isolated peoples. But the principle of trading was not one of them, because the people they met in every case already had a notion of swapping things. Within hours or days of meeting a new tribe, every explorer is bartering. In 1834 in Tierra del Fuego a young naturalist named Charles Darwin came face to face with some hunter-gatherers: ‘Some of the Fuegians plainly showed that they had a fair notion of barter. I gave one man a large nail (a most valuable present) without making any signs for a return; but he immediately picked out two fish, and handed them up on the point of his spear.’ Darwin and his new friend needed no common language to understand the bargain they were agreeing. Likewise, New Guinea highlanders, when first contacted by Michael Leahy and his fellow prospectors in 1933, gave them bananas in exchange for cowrie shells. Pre-contact, the New Guineans had been trading stone axes over large distances for a very long time. In Australia, baler shells and stone axes had been crossing the entire continent by trade for untold generations. The people of the Pacific coast of North America were sending seashells hundreds of miles inland, and importing obsidian from even farther afield. In Europe and Asia in the Old Stone Age, amber, obsidian, flint and seashells were travelling farther than