3 ms·
Yet, no H. neanderthal. site has yielded any scrap of unambiguous evidence of long-distance trade. It might be their defining quality, vs H. sap. But they were
by moloch-hai 4y ago
Yet, no H. neanderthal. site has yielded any scrap of unambiguous evidence of long-distance trade. It might be their defining quality, vs H. sap. But they were undeniably human, otherwise.
I don't know if Denisovans traded, but they seem to have had a rotary drill tens of millennia ahead of us. Apparently there was at least one other human species in southern Asia, not resolved yet, who left a genetic trace.
You skirt dangerously close to "markets are a law of nature". Make no mistake, every last detail of our markets had to be invented. Millions of variations were tried, and are still being tried. It has not converged yet.
- monero-xmr 4y agoI disagree - to trade is to be human, and markets are emergent phenomena rather than designed ones. Otherwise North Korea wouldn’t have black markets.
- moloch-hai 4y agoSo, Neanderthal do not qualify, then? Your view of humanity is artificially narrow. North Korea is as much a product of shared history as anyplace else.
- monero-xmr 4y agoNot sure I follow. My point is North Korea is a communist dictatorship that bans markets yet they exist anyway
- moloch-hai 4y agoNorth Korea wishes they could keep their population in a vacuum divorced from history, but wishing has been ineffective. Of course their upper echelon is passionately involved in international commerce.
- geysersam 4y agoModern markets have rules. Such as property rights. Those are invented. There's nothing fundamentally natural about them. Humans engage in every kind of relationship imaginable. No surprise that trade is one of them.
- monero-xmr 4y agoMarkets and trading predate any formal type of rules. We have rules in certain markets now but this was not the case for most of history
- moloch-hai 4y agoLiterally no markets anywhere, ever, operate without invented rules.