European Association of Evolutionary Political Economy,

Rome, November 2008                      

 

The Pre-History of Bargaining: a multi-disciplinary treatment (Part 1)[i]

 

© Gavin Kennedy (Heriot-Watt University)

 

Contents

Introduction                                                             

Adam Smith’s Theory of bargaining                    

Origins of bargaining                                             

The present as history                                            

Grooming and gossip                                             

Short history of the hominids                                 

Weak and Strong Versions of the Quasi Bargain     

Norms and metanorms                                          

Scavenging and hunting                                         

Sharing norms                                                         

Evolutionary psychology                                         

End Notes                                                                

 

Introduction

Labour economists studying bargaining are familiar with the works of Zeuthen (1931), Hicks (1931), Nash (1950), Pen (1952), Schelling (1956); Harsanyi (1956),and Cross (1965).[ii]  These and other modern theories attempt to determine the price of labour under conditions of bilateral monopoly. 

 

The bargaining models divide neatly: those that attempt to capture the process of wage bargaining (Zeuthen, etc.,) and those that side step the process and define the optimal bargained outcome (Nash).  The former map converging expectations, whilst mediating offers and demands under threats (coercive strikes or lockouts), and the latter define the outcome (maximising the product of the parties’ net gains), assuming numerical utility, perfect rationality, equal bargaining skills and perfect information of each party’s preferences. 

 

What is surprising in such attempts to model bargaining transactions, is that they ignore Smith’s Wealth Of Nations[iii] in their deliberations, which is all the more strange because Smith’s interest in the bargaining process to determine exchangeable value is explicit, is at the centre of his theory of political economy, and is presented clearly.[iv] 

 

The paper introduces Adam Smith’s theory of bargaining and explores his conjectures about the evolution of ‘a certain propensity to truck, barter, and exchange’, drawing from other disciplines, such as anthropology, sociology, primatology, history, and evolutionary psychology, and develops a theory of the pre-history of bargaining from simple reciprocity, or the ‘quasi-bargain’ in its weak and strong forms, through to bargaining as an alternative to plunder.[v] 

 

Smith’s Theory of bargaining[vi]

Exchange is a clear evolutionary concept in Wealth Of Nations (and in his other works, Moral Sentiments and Lectures, and it appears early in one of his most frequently quoted paragraphs:

 

“This division of labour, from which so many advantages are derived, is not originally the effect of any human wisdom, which foresees and intends that general opulence to which it gives occasion. It is the necessary, though very slow and gradual consequence of a certain propensity in human nature which has in view no such extensive utility; the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another.” [vii]

 

Smith opens with the proposition that man in civilised society ‘stands at all times in need of the co-operation and assistance of great multitudes, while his whole life is scarce sufficient to gain the friendship of a few persons’, and contrasts this near total dependence of modern man upon others with the mature self-sufficiency of early human ‘savages’ in the age of hunting, who rarely had occasion for the assistance of conspecifics.  This leaves post-hunting man in constant need of assistance from others, and their unprecedented dependence grows with economic improvement in roundabout production and supply chains.[viii] 

The main problem for humans, from their total dependence on mostly unknown and unknowable others, is how to persuade distant others, with whom they have no direct contact, to provide the necessary assistance that they need?  Modern humans, unlike independent animals, bargain along supply chains in which people do not know others more than a link ahead or behind.  As exchange grew, was monetised, and spread, ‘every man … lives by exchanging, or becomes in some measure a merchant, and the society itself grows to be what is properly a commercial society’.[ix] 

 

          ‘The real foundation of [barter] is that principle to perswade which so    much prevails in human nature.  When any arguments are offered to    perswade, it is always expected that they should have their proper effect.  If a person asserts any thing about the moon, tho’ it should not be true, he will feels a kind of uneasiness in being contradicted, and would be very glad that the person he is endeavouring to perswade  should be of the same way of thinking with himself.  We ought then mainly to cultivate the power of perswasion, and indeed we do so without intending it.   Since a whole life is spent in the exercise of it, a ready method of bargaining with each other must undoubtedly be attained’.[x]

 

Smith pursues this theme in Moral Sentiments in words applicable to the conversations, disputes and tempers common in conversations and in  bargaining processes:

‘Society and conversation, therefore, are the most powerful remedies for restoring the mind to its tranquillity, if, at any time, it has unfortunately lost it; as well as the best preservatives of that equal and happy temper, which is so necessary to self-satisfaction and enjoyment’.[xi]  In disputes, tones and tempers can be fraught. People passionately express their demands, feel bitterly about their grievances, and remember earlier bruising events, committed by the other party. Negotiation as an alternative to violence is not always, or even necessarily, all ‘sweetness and light’, and even when present, different solutions necessarily lie on the table. We negotiate because we disagree with other people’s solution to our negotiation problem (be it a price, an amount, when and how we pay, or when title passes, and so on).

 

Negotiations towards an agreed solution require the parties to move from the solutions they brought to the table. How this movement is managed is highlighted in Moral Sentiments and is easily recognisable in practise. [xii]

 

An agreed solution requires co-operation. Enmity hinders, but does not necessarily preclude, agreement. From two solutions to the same problem the parties can only agree to a single solution, normally different from the original two. One-way compromises are seldom acceptable. The movement of the parties from their original solutions expresses each party’s contribution to the joint agreement. My approval of your modified opinions is to adopt them; to disapprove is to reject them.[xiii]

 

Differences of opinion are endemic. Negotiators are not price takers and emotions as to worth, merit, and desert runs high. Smith puts it well:

 

 

Walkouts, denigrating rhetoric, and angry threats may cloud the air as negotiators let loose their passions which in the absence of empathy distort their perceptions. Your solution threatens my future; mine threatens yours.

 

The parties justify their stances in debate. Movement in negotiation is not swift. Negotiators make speeches, exchange questions and responses, and may endure bitter exchanges threatening to spoil the chances for success. But new information undermining the tenability of their stances may finally persuade them to move and, with mutual movement, tones and tempers may change, sometimes dramatically, other times grudgingly, and is usually accompanied by a sense of relief (even euphoria) as tensions ease and a common solution emerges. Capturing all that in a model of the process makes for cumbersome mathematics; hence valiant and ingenious attempts to do so have faded.[xv]

 

The Smithian negotiator becomes aware that only by ‘lowering his passion to that pitch’, which the other party ‘is capable of going along with’, can he hope for a ‘concord of the affections’ as a prelude to the harmony flowing from an ‘agreed valuation’.[xvi] And what is true for one party is true also for the other. The angry negotiator ‘must flatten … the sharpness of his natural tone, in order to reduce it to the harmony and concord with the emotions of those who are about him.’ What each feels is never exactly the same (they both view their own interests differently), but by lowering expressions of their self-interests to make them more acceptable and to meet the other side’s movement from whence they started the discourse, both sides review their passionate (often extreme) stances, looking at them in some measure with the eyes of the other party: ‘The reflected passion … is much weaker than the original one’ and ‘it necessarily abates the violence of what he felt’ before the meeting.[xvii]

 

Negotiators, in short, cannot get all they want and, at some point, realise the futility of insisting on unmitigated selfishness; both parties volunteer to accept an agreed solution, if they can find one.  In this manner, negotiators, suppressing their selfish inclination to demand everything for nothing or little in return, ‘always endeavour to bring down [their] passions to that pitch, which the [other negotiator] may be expected to go along with’.[xviii]

 

From this we can appreciate Smith’s clear statement of the conditional proposition, the core idea of the propensity to exchange, discovered in practice uncounted millennia ago as humans struggled to find an alternative to violence.  This was expressed clearly by Smith, but was ignored by generations of economists, possibly because few of them observed negotiators at work with the same focus as the author of Wealth Of Nations:

 

          ‘Whoever offers to another a bargain of any kind, proposes to do this.  Give me that which I want and you shall have this which you want, is  the meaning of every such offer; and it is in this manner that we obtain from one another the far greater part of those good offices that we stand in need of’ (emphasis added). [xix]

 

Traded concession-convergence, prompted and promoted by Smithian conditional propositions, brings the negotiators towards ‘agreed valuations’, which ‘are the most powerful remedies for restoring the mind to its tranquillity, if at any time, it has unfortunately lost it; as well as the best preservatives of that equal and happy temper, which is so necessary to self-satisfaction and enjoyment’ and ‘which is so common among men of the world.’[xx]

This describes the ‘negotiation dance’ through which the parties approach each other’s converging positions by trading reciprocal movement on the negotiable issues.  They ‘give to get’ by reducing their demands and increasing their offers.  In short, they exchange conditional propositions that in time converge upon an agreeable solution to their bargaining problem.

 

The evolution of the conditional proposition plays a significant role in this account of the prehistory of bargaining. Think of the conditional proposition like the two elements, sodium and chlorine, which when separated are harmful to humans, but once linked to form ordinary table salt, are the foundation of life. Conditional propositions, likewise, consist of two elements, demands and offers, harmful when separated (because demands without offers are selfish and offers without demands submissively reward selfishness), but when linked conditionally – you can’t expect to get one without the other - they bring the negotiators to an “agreed valuation”. 

 

Linking conditions with offers defines the common propensity of truck, barter and exchange. That Smith taught the conditional proposition over two hundred years before it entered today’s negotiation literature is remarkable, but not quite as remarkable as it lying ignored and unnoticed, a veritable sleeping beauty, for so long in Wealth of Nations. [xxi]

 

Origins of bargaining?

Is it possible to find out anything about the origins of bargaining in pre-history? I am mindful of a ‘species of philosophical investigation’ called  ‘Theoretical and Conjectural History’, attributed to Adam Smith by his first biographer, Dugald Stewart (1753-1828): ‘In examining the history of mankind, as well as in examining the phenomena of the material world, when we cannot trace the process by which an event has been produced, it is often of importance to be able to show how it may have been produced by natural causes’ [original emphasis].[Resorting to that method we can consider conjectural theories about what certain events may have produced.

 

The propensity to exchange, Smith said, was probably ‘the necessary consequence of the faculties of reason and speech’ and, because these particular human faculties pre-dated the emergence of ‘modern’ society, the exchange propensity evolved long before the appearance of commerce.[xxiii]  Exchange, therefore, was practised long before modern capitalist markets appeared in the 19^th century (cf. Karl Polanyi’s contrary assertions and their rebuttal by Maurice Silver).[xxiv]

 

The ‘revolution’ in the modes of subsistence, beginning in the Near East between 8,000 and 11,000 years ago, eventually took the descendants of those involved from ‘the Age of Hunters through ‘the Age of Shepherds’ and ‘the Age of Agriculture’ to (‘at last’) ‘the Age of Commerce’.[xxv] 

 The long social-evolutionary changes occasioned by the propensity to exchange drove the division of labour and place its origins deep into pre-history.[xBriefly, I speculate into pre-history about the spread of exchange behaviour, first among primate groups, followed by an interpretative account of exchange among various hominids and humans.[xxvii]

 

The present as history

Uniquely, we can get an albeit blurred view of the past from the detailed observations of primate behaviour over more than 45 years since Jane Goodall arrived at the Gombe Stream National Park, Tanzania to study chimpanzees.[xThese near-relatives are of special interest in that humans descended from a common ancestor, a species of ape now extinct, about five million years ago.  While both species evolved unique traits since the separation, they shared the same traits at the separation, and therefore it is possible to observe and to assess the relative significance of certain differences by considering their development over the last five million years. 

 

Adam Smith pronounced that ‘Nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with a dog.  Nobody ever saw one animal by its gestures and natural cries signify to another, this is mine, that yours; I am willing to give this for that’.[xxix] 

But he had not observed apes in the wild, and neither did he know about the time-scales involved in Darwinian ‘natural selection’,[xnor the significance of the shorter time-scales required for social-evolution associated with brain growth. 

 

Alpha males, who monopolise female sexual availability, dominate chimpanzee societies and the consumption of whatever scraps of meat they obtain from small animals (rodents, red Colobus monkeys, bush piglets, juvenile baboons).  Male chimps seldom share meat with females with the exception of when a female is in ‘estrus’ (a short period of sexually activity): ‘it is not unusual to see the males, carcass in one hand, pause in his feeding to mate her – after which she is usually allowed to share his prey’.  Goodall describes these instances as females having a ‘sexual bargaining point.[i] Other observers report similar instances.[ii]  However, these examples may not be deliberate attempts at bargaining; they may be tenuous coincidences ‘that somewhat resembles a human behaviour’.[iii]

 

Grooming and gossip

Chimpanzees exhibit behavioural characteristics that help them to maintain cohesive groups in their rain-forest environments, which they and the early hominids inherited from the common ancestor.  When groups of them common spread across the African landscape and became separated physically, their destinies were vulnerable to events, such as floods, earthquakes, volcanoes, fire and climatic changes, which cut off the wanderers.   Accidentally separated some reacted differently as the environment slowly changed (becoming drier, say), and their familiar food sources diminished or disappeared.  The wanderers either adapted or failed until no longer reproductively viable, as happened ten million years ago to several species of ape now extinct; in contrast, many new species of monkey appeared.  Natural selection requires time to have effect.[iv] 

 

The case of the Bonobo, a speciation from the chimpanzee from about 2-3 million years ago, now confined to a small area in modern Congo, show quite different behaviour patterns to both chimpanzees and humans in non-dominance and bi-sexual promiscuity.[v]  ‘Cultural’ (not biological) differences in grooming, food sharing, courtship and tool-making are detected in groups of chimpanzees physically separated between East and West Africa.

 

Chimpanzees and hominids coexisted in rain forest and woodland environments for three million years or more.  At a distance they probably looked and behaved similarly; both had black hairy coats, were about three feet tall and foraged from the same plants, insects, and small animals. Whilst hominids gradually became bipedal, chimpanzees’ remained knuckle walkers. Two million years ago groups of hominids left the tropical forests to the chimpanzees for good.

 

The early hominids shared with chimpanzees the behavioural trait of grooming, which is about hygiene, but this may not be its sole purpose.  Groomed animals benefit from the removal of bits of dead skin, debris, parasites, scabs, plus cleaning of small wounds.  Observation suggests that the time spent grooming often exceeds that necessary for the purely hygienic functions.  The total time of intense grooming added to gesture grooming defines the social function of grooming.[vi]  Intense grooming is discretionary (not ordained by dominance relationships) and usually is reciprocal.  Chimps exercise discretion by grooming those who groom them, and refrain from grooming those who don’t. Grooming exchanges are a ‘quasi-bargain’ because the offer is separated (they have no language) from the implied obligation.  Without reciprocation the quasi-bargain relationship ends. 

 

‘Grooming, then, can be used,’ noted Richard Byrne, ‘as a sort of “trade currency”, it can be exchanged for benefits of others kinds at later dates.   Grooming an animal is an investment for the future.  The investment is not without costs: grooming takes time.’ [vii]  When our lineage lost its hairy-coats, by which time humans could speak, gossip replaced grooming, suggests Robin Dunbar, a psychologist.  Gossip with a small group is a more productive quasi-bargain than grooming separate conspecifics one at a time.  The optimal size of a gossip circle is up to five; beyond five it is difficult to keep everybody mutually involved in a gossip exchange.[viii]

 

Short history of the hominids

The narrative of the prehistory of the Hominids necessarily must be truncated and what follows leaps across the evolution of many hominid species and early humans.  The focus is on the significant changes between chimpanzee societies and the various hominids, and how they affected quasi-bargaining behaviours.

 

Assuming that chimpanzee evolution has been fairly stable, we can note that the descendants of the early hominids (the Australopithecines, or Southern Apes) became quite different from their nearest relatives, the chimpanzee.  These differences can be summarised roughly as: human sexual activity outside estrus; bipedal locomotion; larger brains; relative lack of body hair; stone tools and diet.  However, they remained similar by living in social groups; general, not just Alpha male domination; unequal parenting activities; high levels of male aggression and violence; capacities for deception; selfishness; co-operation and alliances. 

 

The major change was in female sexuality.  The chimpanzee female in her crouched quadruped locomotion displays her readiness for sexual activity (estrus) by prominently displaying her pink swelling, in which sexual activity was mainly dominated by dimorphic Alpha males.[ix]  The hominid species developed differently somewhere along their time line as they adopted bipedal upward-standing postures. 

 

Upright hominid females, in effect, ‘hid’ the visible sexual signalling of the crouched chimpanzees (female chimpanzees are almost physically incapable of sexual activity outside estrus). The change was accompanied by their ‘availability’ except during menstruation.  The monopoly sexual activity of the Alpha male and his allies ended; monopolising a few females at a time for a few days was an infinitely easier task than guarding twenty or thirty females spread across the territory, gathering food.  This altered the hominid male-alpha over males power-balance; new alliances became possible.[x]  It also promoted selection changes; one species selected for brawn, the other for larger brains.  In time, the physically heavier brawn selections became extinct; they fed adequately to breed, but not sufficiently for a brain capable of managing new sociability and ‘male provisioning’ – not even in a million years.  The proto-humans (the Ancients), selected for brain growth and added meat to their diet rather than rely solely on intensive lower-quality, bulk vegetation.  And they coped with the new politics of sex [xi] and the new politics of exchange.

Steven Pinker summarised the bigger brain problems:

          “First, the brain is bulky.  The female pelvis barely accommodates a baby’s outsize head.  That design compromise kills many women during childbirth and requires a pivoting gait ... Second, the brain needs   energy.  Neural tissue is metabolically greedy; our brains take up only two per cent of our body weight but consume twenty per cent of our energy and nutrients.” [xii]   

 

Brain growth was relentless from the Afaris hominids (4 to 2.5 million years ago), when the hominid brain was about 400cc, compared to chimpanzee brains at 383cc. It grew from about 450cc (Boissei) to 630cc (Habilis, the stone toolmakers), and then to 900 cc (Erectus, a half million years later).  Archaic Homo sapiens’ brains, 400,000 years ago, reached 1100 cc, and modern Homo sapiens, topped at 1400 cc from 100,000 years ago.  The modern human baby is totally helpless for a longer period after birth than an ape’s, with both having brains at birth of comparable size (385 cc); but the modern human brain grows outside the womb to about 1400 cc in four years. And while brain size is not proportional to intelligence, human brains grew incomparably in brainpower to those of the hominids and chimpanzees.

 

Female hominids (and chimps) fed themselves and infants; males fed themselves. The dietary needs of the Ancients, required major changes in foraging habits; they became subject to the ‘Homo dilemma’.

 

Some explanations for these changes in intelligence are not convincing.  The larger brain did not enable the Ancients to hunt; other animals (hyenas, wild dogs, lions and chimpanzees) hunt with much smaller brains, and the brains grew for two million years before Moderns (Homo sapiens) practised big-game hunting on a significant scale. Hominids foraged successfully for millions of years before Homo’s brain size was double the size of a chimpanzee’s. The lack of food sources and unequal contributions from foraging could have as easily produced selection pressure for smaller, not larger, brains.

 

Ancients and Moderns needed larger brains to manage their intensified sociability and their larger brains intensified their sociability.  It is in the comparison between the fates of the hominids that took or did not take this route, that we find confirmation of the hypothesis: brains grew to match complexity in sociability, which was essential to survival, and without which sociability, brain growth viability was unsustainable.

 

The old foraging arrangements could not solve the Homo dilemma because the mainly herbivorous intake was insufficient (the hominids that relied on it became extinct), but as the meat proportion of Homo’s omnivorous diet increased it made a difference. Scavenging carcasses of animals dead from natural causes, or from the remains of prey killed by predators was an option.  The animals the Ancients chased, or whose carcasses they scavenged, were not large.   Habilis sought the same animals as those prized by modern chimpanzees, but once the demands of brain growth increased to those of Erectus (900cc), small rodent-size hunting was insufficiently reliable, or regular enough. Two million years after Habilis, the Moderns went after live bigger game.[xiii] 

 

The emergence of Habilis coincided with the appearance of the first stone tools for preparing meat or bones for consumption from the scavenged carcasses of animals, and for shaping wooden tools for digging and hunting. Both sources of food increased. Adult food sharing imposed cognitive demands on both sexes.  Social changes which accompanied physiological changes fed back through reproductive success to cause more social changes, which were followed by further physiological changes and so on. 

 

The behavioural changes that addressed the Homo Dilemma took root gradually and endured.   Lasting social change requires deep roots, including learning and passing on to later generations.  Overly rapid changes crumble within a generation or two. 

 

The common characteristic of monopolistic alpha mating was that males did not discriminate with whom they copulated.   The decline of alpha dominance changed the norm from indiscriminate copulation of a few males, according to brute strength or opportunity, to one of discriminating promiscuity by the many. The onset of Homo Dilemma favoured discriminate mate selection.  Both females and males had strong though different motives to prefer it. 

 

The Ancient band ‘fragmented’ internally into promiscuous sub-units of ‘families’ of ‘favourites’. Multilateral bonding led to the undifferentiated single promiscuous band becoming a faintly differentiated collective of sub-bands.  The traditional ‘family’ consisting of single-parent mothers and their babies and infants was the inherited foundation of the band, which three million years of the Southern Apes had not obliterated. It was matrifocal [xiv] because children stayed close to their mother and the mother stayed close to female relatives.  Children had no concept of a male parent or ‘father’.

 

The real test of non-exclusive promiscuous sexual exchange was: ‘what happened when she became pregnant?’  Did males continue sharing food or did they desert their obligations?  Copulation for a couple of months followed by perhaps two or four years before mothers resumed sexual activity, in exchange for food provisioning before sexual relations were resumed, was not sustainable.  Something was needed to prevent desertion. 

 

The weakest form of the quasi-bargain (‘If you take the benefit you ought to pay the cost’) – which is what a ‘courtship’ transaction amounted to – was evolutionarily fragile.  Mothers could not hope to transact with males for their sexual access to male-generated food while they were lactating, but males expected sexual access to continue.   The dilemma required sustained increases in food intake which required regular male contributions.

There was no uniformity in the relationships of the Ancients across innumerable bands, with innumerable personalities over hundreds of thousands of years in the myriad of the circumstances they experienced.  Every combination of experimental form and possible solution were likely tried since the Ancients first set their feet on earth and their hands on each other.  But not all possibilities were viable.   So, how did they all survive, in the absence of regular male contributions beyond feeding themselves?  Deserted mothers shared food provided by their sisters or their mothers, or lived on what they could forage until they became available for new attempts at quasi-bargains with others. 

As food demands grew, because a greater number of large-brained children survived longer, it also took more than one male to supply the necessary food, and the nature of scavenging (and, much later, of hunting) required co-operating males, not lone hunters. It also took more than one female to supply sexual availability because of regular interruptions for pregnancies and nursing.

 

Weak and Strong Versions of the Quasi Bargain

Desertion is equivalent to cheating in a quasi-bargain. The learned behaviours of the weak quasi-bargain - ‘I scratch your back in the expectation that you will scratch mine’ - had several million years of practice behind them (at least while the Ancients still had hairy coats).  The stakes from defection were decidedly different in grooming (at most an inconvenience) compared to foraging (in extreme, life-threatening).  That made cheat detection crucial and recognising cheats and punishing them was at the core of the strong quasi-bargain.  

 

Refusing to groom them punishes grooming cheaters. In the ‘food-for-sex’ quasi-bargain, when the non-reciprocation was life threatening, severer punishment was needed. If a cheater provoked enough ire by persistent defection,[xv] the punishment was exclusion from the band, for if cheating by defectors in a weak ‘courtship’ quasi-bargain did not provoke expulsion, their unpunished behaviour encouraged imitators, or could provoke a split in the band, with detractors walking off to form a separate band.

 

Deacon suggests that prospective defections adding to selection pressure for smarter brains by imposing a premium on mate choice from the collection and processing of the information required to make a judgement about a male’s propensity to desert.[xvi] But preventative detection did not resolve the incidence of the problem.  Punishing cheats became mandatory because of the awesome consequences of an unpunished defection for the survival of adults and progeny.  A failure to solve the Homo Dilemma that caused fewer bigger-brained infants to survive long enough to breed would select for smaller brains and doom Homo as a species.  

 

Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin asked: Did monogamy rapidly become the norm, creating nuclear families within a small gathering community?  Or did males simply provide meat as a cooperative venture for the whole of the band – males, females, and infants? [xvii] I suggest it was something in-between monogamy and promiscuity across matrifocal families in the band; in short the strong quasi-bargain, the initiation of which required the first imperative (‘sex now, food later’), and the second imperative, the certainty of punishment for defection. Homo cognition also grew in part under the pressure to create ‘scripts’ for the making, improving and monitoring of quasi-bargains and for detecting and dealing with cheats. The imperative moved from ‘If you take the benefit you ought to pay the costs’ to ‘if you take the benefit you must pay the costs’.

The first step to the strong quasi-bargain was for incentivised males to supply females with food after pregnancy.  Females, contemplating the problem of their sexual unavailability, found temporary substitutes for themselves in their sisters or close female friends (plus, perhaps, older female adults too) willing to be available. [xviii]  This was the essential behavioural foundation for the stronger quasi-bargain.

Male interest was in sex, not fatherhood. Female interest was in the survival of their children, and not necessarily in monogamous or any other kind of ‘marriage’.  Males who were the regular sex partners of several females, which, as Leakey cautions,[xix] did not mean they were incessantly copulating with them, supplied regular contributions of food, mainly meat, for females and children. 

The practice of regular access to females, in an alliance of two matrifocal ‘families,’ would gradually pull males into supplying resources for parenting during lactation. When several males complied, this was enough for the ‘family’ to gain an advantage over those whose weak quasi-bargains were prone to failure.  Moreover, the same provisioning arrangements that supplied additional nutrients to mothers and their children also added nutrients to adult males as well, raising everybody’s food intake.  If many gain and few lose, the arrangement becomes evolutionarily stable. 

If mate selection initiated tremendous selection pressure for bigger brains, as Deacon suggests, then the first steps from the weak to the strong quasi-bargain must have ramped-up selection pressures on cognition by several quanta.  While sexual relationships transformed the Ancients’ social arrangements, the social evolution of the strong quasi-bargain sustained selection pressure for bigger brains throughout the two million years from Habilis to Sapiens.   The struggle to articulate the complications, tensions, assessments, revisions of original opinions, exchanges of personal histories, who did what to whom and on behalf of whom, the sifting of preferences, regrets, denials, affirmations and the choices associated with the complexities of their quasi-bargains, were incomparably stronger sources of selection pressure than the weak quasi-bargains of the kind the hominids inherited and shared with the chimpanzees.

Its many probable causes, over many years and personal circumstances, fit the multiple courses of social evolution.  Nothing draconian and nothing dramatic introduced the strong quasi-bargain – it emerged like a constant drip from the tap of social change.  That is how social evolution works.  There were no rules, laws or governance.   What people did was subject to no higher authority than themselves.  They did what they wanted, what others let them do and what they got away with.

Norms and metanorms

Robert Axelrod, who modelled the evolution of ‘norms’, illustrates how behavioural changes that work spread throughout a local population and, eventually, the species.  He defines a norm, behaviourally, as ‘the extent to which individuals usually act in a certain way and are often punished when seen not to be acting in this way.’ [xx] I apply his model of norms to the evolution of the solution of the Homo Dilemma. 

People judge the success or failure of different strategies of behaviour.  Those following poor strategies tend to imitate those following better strategies, but behavioural norms have benefits as well as costs.   One of which costs is the punishment of defection.   That is the link of norm theory to the strong quasi-bargain, because a failure to perform your side of a bargain invokes the possibility of punishment.

 

The norm of food-for-sex must incur punishment for defection to become evolutionary stable, i.e., replicable for the reproductive benefit of the participants.  For males, punishment may be a withdrawal of sexual favours, an expulsion from the extended family, or violence.   For females it may be a withholding of meat and bones from recently scavenged kills, a battering or worse of mother and child, or the killing of members of her extended family.

 

Policing of observed defections enforces norms of punishment for defectors.  If policing erodes to the point that the norm is unenforceable, it ceases to be a norm.  Norms erode from two causes.   Defection occurs because the pay-off (T) for the temptation to defect is greater than the pay-off (C) for compliance or co-operation (T>C).  Others who comply with the old norm may observe any defection and pay the gains of the defectors, but punishment (P) has its costs too.   A punished defector loses perhaps severely (P>T), and those who punish the defector also pay the costs (the effort, energy and risk involved) of enforcing the punishment.

 

Two counter-considerations promote defection even in circumstances that defection may be severely punished. One is the degree of a potential defector’s ‘boldness’ (B) -- his or her inclination to defy the norm.  Boldness relates to the chances of the defection being observed and, when observed, to the chances that it will be punished.  The other is the degree to which players are inclined to ‘vengefulness’ (V) against anybody breaking the norm.

 

If there is a high degree of vengefulness in a population (the certainty that observers punish defections from a norm), then boldness declines because the cost of boldness becomes unacceptably high.  The near certainty of punishment is a deterrent.   But if boldness declines so does vengefulness, because the cost to an individual who punishes an isolated defection is high relative to the impact of one defection on the individual who observes it.  As vengefulness falls towards zero, because defection is rare when boldness is rare, it pays potential defectors to be bold and to defect.   Something else is needed to deter defection besides mood swings between the boldness of individual defectors and the vengefulness of individual norm maintainers.

 

Axelrod invoked the idea of ‘metanorms’ that maintain high vengefulness in a population and deter the re-emergence of boldness.   Under a regime of metanorms, the defector is not the only victim of other people’s vengefulness – so is anyone who fails to enforce the norm on anybody he or she observes defecting.  Under Britain’s 18^th-century Articles of War, mutiny was punished by death, as was a failure to actively resist a mutiny.    Courts Martial recognised no excuse for mutiny and no excuse for failing to put one down.  Neutrality was treated as support for the mutiny.[xxi]  The death sentence was mandatory for both offences.  It was an effective metanorm; it raised the incidence of vengefulness among the majority of a crew to high levels and simultaneously kept down any tendencies to boldness among individuals tempted to mutiny.   

 

In effect, metanorms become self-policing.   Some people relish the exercise of vengefulness and regard its costs as negligible or even positive.   They actively seek the slightest sign of defection and report it to the policing authorities.   They are fanatics for the norm and they believe any defection from the norm, no matter how trivial, presages a collapse in ‘society as we know it.’  

 

Others volunteer to abide by a norm.  They see benefits in continuing to do so and they accept the costs of enforcing the punishment.   One way to avoid enforcement costs is not to deal with people who have a reputation for breaking their promises. Not bargaining with reputed defectors is a relatively costless form of punishment and potential defectors avoid a reputation for defection by not defecting. 

 

Could the strong quasi-bargain successfully invade a population where male defection was the norm?   Yes!  But no individual needed to know the cumulative affect of imposing a meta norm (the consequence of behaviours is not predictable; the law of unintended consequences). The acid test for evolution is: did progeny survive long enough to breed more successfully than with parents operating under the old arrangements?  It had nothing to do with what was ‘right’, ‘wrong’ or ‘moral’ (among the Ancients there were no moral philosophers!).[xxii]  Which norm ensured the survival of progeny under conditions of post-natal brain and body growth? For sure, multilateral promiscuity policed by the stronger quasi-bargain worked. If it hadn’t, Homo may have disappeared.

 

The strong quasi-bargain imposed punishment norms and metanorms.    Quasi-bargains are known to exist in cognitively weak species.  Certain species of vampire bats share blood with fellow bats that fail to find any.  This appears to involve an expectation of reciprocation from the receiver, whenever the donor fails to find blood on another night.[xxiii]  Reciprocation among bats is self-policed and cheaters are excluded from blood sharing.   To cheat in a bat colony is biologically suicidal -- no borrowed blood, no future.  

Among humans the strong quasi-bargain had to be buttressed by the certainty of punishment.  Male aggression nourished by collective pressure increased the risks to cheaters because males meted out severe punishments for defection.  Entrenching the strong version of the quasi-bargain and the certainty of punishment evolved to chastise those who changed their minds, perhaps because their partners were unconscionable or because they preferred to avoid the risks of scavenging or hunting.  Once the punishment of deserters spread over the generations, the enforcement of the strong quasi-bargain solved the Homo Dilemma.  Less welcome, from the successful chasing, ambushing and punishing miscreants, there emerged other unintended behaviours that increased inter-communal violence, such as punishment raids to murder deserters or to seize females from nearby bands.

 

Scavenging and hunting

The strong quasi-bargain raised the productivity of food provisioning to match the demands of large-brain Homo. Because they solved the Homo Dilemma, selection pressure for bigger brains and greater cognitive power succeeded despite the odds.[xxiv]   They created the first divisions of labour based on the varying proficiencies within (but not necessarily between) the sexes, particularly in the manufacture and use of stone tools.[xxv]

The Ancients were not were not big-game hunters of animals larger than themselves.  They scavenged carcasses that fell where the animals died and learned to improve their scavenging with the aid of stone tools, such as small stone flints, cutters and scrapers, which cut through tough animal hides, tendons and cartilage. There are no new tools suitable for hunting big game amongst excavated sites; their tools hardly changed for about a million years.  Scavenging involved conscious (thought not necessarily always voluntary) co-operation for locating and dismembering animal carcasses. Co-operation also arose from acts of collective punishment of defectors, not from the presence of benign virtues.

 

Irregular and intermittent exchanges of scraps of meat, opportunistically hunted by males, gave way to more regular exchanges of deliberately scavenged meat between specific groups of adults. Over a season, the wilful collection of small packets of nutritious meat and bone marrow, when added to plant food gathered by females and males manner, produced substantial volumes of high-quality food. As more individuals and their infants formed extended families, based on a strong quasi-bargain, the continuing rise in food quantity was met.

 

It is a large cognitive step from scavenging to kill prey in competition with other predators. Accumulated knowledge from observing predators stalking and killing prey provided the mental challenges for humans before they tried to hunt large game.  Scavenging that promoted co-operation also induced the use of stone-tools to dissect carcases quickly. Thus they learned about the habits of large fauna, how to read their tracks, how to butcher speedily, how to keep rival predators at bay with wooden clubs, long spears, stones, noise and, in due course, fire.   More subtly, it taught them how to share with those not present during the hunt.  

 

Sharing norms

Craig Stanford drew important lessons from his study of hunting:

“The evolutionary history of our hunting and scavenging past lies therefore not so much in the hunt but in the division of the spoils.   While there appears to be little continuity in the hunting tendencies of ancient and technologically simple modern people, there is a vital link in the use of meat as a currency, a valued good.  This link is found in the behaviour of apes and people when the sharing of meat occurs, or when food is used to manipulate the behaviour of others.  In the distribution of meat in apes, as in other social arenas, we see control and power at the heart of both male and female patterns of behaviour.  In the attempts of either sex to tip the balance of power, we may be seeing the roots of human gender relations.  When meat becomes a resource that is not only a resource but also a social currency - a way to help you obtain what you want in the group - we are seeing the emergence of barter, currency-based human social systems.” [xxvi]

 

There had to be agreement about the distribution of the spoils of the chase.   If it was “catcher’s keepers” (as with chimpanzees and Southern Apes) it would not have sustained the extended families.   The whole point of the quasi-bargain was to share the spoils between the catchers and the matrifocal family.  Therefore there had to be a social mechanism to ensure that the chasers shared with the non-chasers, otherwise individuals and the group faced local extinction.  In a Darwinian sense, the individual may not care about the group (natural selection works on the individual not the group) but an individual had to care about the fate of some minimum number of other individuals if he was to achieve his own survival goals.   A chase was more successful if it was conducted by several of the most fleet-footed individuals, backed by the best stone toolmakers and the bravest perimeter skirmishers and pickets who warded of rival predators.    A race with each other it was not.

 

To succeed in worthwhile scavenging the Ancients had to discover that there was safety in numbers and how to make noise near the carcass to ward off intruders.  Scavenging induced co-operation, supported by stronger-willed enforcers.   It also induced stone-tool creation and use.  While predators were busy in a stand-off, or a snarling fight, the scavengers had time to risk a sneak snatch at whatever meat they could get. On such occasions their stone cutting and scraping tools and their disciplined numbers gave them a small enough advantage.  Chimpanzees in a display charge can chase off a leopard; several Ancients screaming in an aggressive charge, catching predators with accurately aimed heavy stones, waving heavy branches, beating a predator’s body with clubs, and generally creating mayhem, could drive off even fearsome predators, at least for a short while.  Meanwhile, the cutters would get to work.   Skilled and brave distracters were party to the quasi-bargain too.

 

In principle, gatherers shared most of what they gathered, killed or found. In principle, strong quasi-bargains within the band’s matrifocal families embraced them all.[xxvii]   Did this mean they all pulled their weight together in whatever way they could best contribute?   Probably not; they were as riven by the usual dissents found in any group of Homo before or since. When it ‘worked’ reasonably well, it was an evolutionary stable compact.   But there were wide variations in the behaviours of the individuals whose co-operation was essential for it to ‘work.’  Groups fell apart when laggards predominated; they were destroyed by careless acts in the vicinity of predators; they were scattered by internal discord and, in consequence, survivors may have endured generations of misery.

          

Gathering plant food, insects, and small animals, was more reliable than relying on opportunistic scavenging.   But gathering was subject to variability, which imposes a cycle, sometimes severe, of ‘feast or famine.’  Some variability was the ‘fault’ of the individual, such as a lack of skills, effort or learning, and sometimes it was bad luck, injury, illness, the chosen search pattern, or attacks by predators.   Where there was variability, there was pressure for sharing among sociable hominids. With multi-lateral promiscuity, sharing whatever food was collected was a small but significant behavioural step for males from merely feeding themselves. Establishing the sex-for-food norm, and policing it effectively, took generations to evolve into a culture of sharing, with additional norms to cope with exceptions, to constrain selfish behaviours and to establish taboos that enforced the metanorms.    Sharing undoubtedly enhances the survival of the individual amidst scarcity.  Sharing as social exchange was a social construct, never a biological adaptation.[xxviii]  It arose directly from the psychology and practise of the quasi-bargain.  If the Ancients suffered cycles of scarcity and abundance, and the cycles were asynchronous (while one individual enjoyed a feast, the other endured famine) a transfer of resources between each other to even-out the cycle proved beneficial (though that does not mean it always happened!).   Over the cycle, sharers benefited.  But could they co-operate despite the nature of their ‘prisoner’s dilemma problem (whether to do what was best for oneself or what was best for one’s partners and one’s self)? [xxix]

 

Frank Marlowe identified six useful distinctions between types of food sharing and by changing the order we glean its possible social-evolution:[xxx]

 

          Mutualism: food for foraging partners, particularly, but not exclusively,    for kin;[xxxi]

 

          Tolerated scrounging (TS) - food for peace (sometimes known as    ‘tolerated theft’);

 

          Costly signalling (CS) – ‘food for non-food benefits, such as sexual access’ - 

         

Reciprocity: 

 

          Not-in-kind exchanges - ‘food A for food B’; [xxxii]

 

 

          In-kind exchanges with delayed reciprocity – ‘food now for same food     later’ (e.g., human equivalent of bats with blood);[xxxiii]

 

Taking Tolerated Scrounging (TS) as the earliest form of sharing, with the successful scavenger (later hunter) being importuned by begging conspecifics, with whom he might be amendable to transact following diminishing marginal utility from his own consumption, especially when matched by any increasing social cost of his continued refusal to share (perhaps provoking ‘theft’, or even violence).   His declining marginal utility may make him ‘prefer’, albeit reluctantly, to share with the importuners (which explains observers’ early characterisation of these episodes as ‘tolerated theft’).  TS would become subject to manipulation on at least two levels.  The scavenger could make rival others ‘beg longer’, which would enhance his status (prestige) in the band at their expense by lowering the status of those begging or he could favour[xxxiv] selected importuners more quickly with a view to receiving benefits from them (sexual access).[xxxv]

 

Repeated episodes of Tolerated Scrounging could lead the scavenger to make a virtue out of sharing his catch with others in a public display of sharing his success and generosity, and repeated episodes would make these ‘exchanges’ a ‘social tool’, and create the ‘psychological mechanisms underlying Costly Signalling to evolve’.[xxxvi]  In Costly Signalling, successful scavengers and hunters ‘show off’ their prowess to potential mates by sharing their meat with everybody without invoking a need scrounging behaviours.  The intention is to show his suitability or attractiveness for mating by being the holder of the prized food, and not the supplicant, but in doing so he also undermines his Costly Signalling in the eyes of his intended mates - if they receive meat just like everybody else (it becomes instead a general ‘demonstration’ event), this reduces their incentive to transact sexually. [xxxvii] 

 

Rival successful scavengers or hunters who engage in alternative Costly Signalling demonstrations, in which they switch between scroungers to holder roles, raise the costs of signalling their suitability to potential mates, by delaying the incidence of private transactions. But the unintended consequence is that the desire to get even with rivals through Costly Signalling in alternative episodes promotes the socio-political modifications to TS and CS that in turn promote what anthropologists recognise as Reciprocal Altruism (RA), (quasi-bargaining).[xxxviii]  Jim Moore saw CS and RA as ‘functionally and historically related, having developed in that order during hominin evolution’.[xxxix]  Regular exchanges of roles creates the reality of reciprocal acts of sharing between the more prominent members; these just require formal recognition of the exchanges of food for the ‘reciprocal altruism’ (quasi-bargains’) to become habitual, even if they tended to be ‘hidden’ within the general share out of their scavenged (or hunted) food.  

 

Sharing quasi-bargains are significant.  Assume I have a surplus of food above what I can consume and as I cannot conserve my surplus - there were no refrigerators during in the Pleistocene! – it has diminishing, even zero value, for me.  It is wasted.  I donate it to you if you have insufficient or none.  For you, my surplus food has a high marginal positive value. This is a classic trade: I exchange that which has little or no value for me but which has greater value to you, in the expectation (hope) that you will reciprocate when I need your surplus food later.   Days later, I fail to successfully gather, scavenge, or hunt food, but if you have a surplus from you efforts, you donate (CS) it to me.  It has no or little value to you -- you are satiated – but it has value to me because without it I starve.  Sharing keeps us both alive by evening out our feast and famine days.   The timing of when we exchange is the real value of the quasi-bargain and not the physical quantities we exchange.  

 

What was true for any two individuals was true for the matrifocal ‘families’ in the band.  Boyd & Silk[xl] give an example (which I have modified) of the arithmetical imperatives of sharing between five hominids who scavenge for meat and hunt small game over a ten day period.   If each hominid has a 1-in-5 chance each day of finding a carcass or making a kill then they have a 0.2 chance of feasting and a 0.8 chance of doing without.   Over the ten days the probability of having nothing to eat is 0.8¹⁰ = 0.1 (approximately); they have a 10% chance of starving every 10 days.   This is an unacceptably high risk to bear but they can dramatically improve the odds in their favour by agreeing to food sharing quasi-bargains.    Five hominids have a 33% chance that none of them will find food (0.8⁵ = 0.33) on a particular day but over ten days the chances of nobody finding a carcass or making a kill reduces to only one chance in 10,000 approximately.  Provided they agree to share whatever they bring back, and assuming this is sufficient to feed them all, sharing keeps them all alive, except in the most desperate of circumstances when they drift towards nature’s imperative: ‘every one for him or herself.’   Sharing, when backed by the punishment of non-sharers, keeps the group alive longer than non-sharing.

 

Craig Stanford in his otherwise excellent volume on hominid hunting, nevertheless misunderstood the dynamics of trade in his sub-chapter, ‘The Art of the Bargain’, where he presents trade as a zero-sum game:   

 

“In the pattern of sharing we see the roots of both sides of our altruistic and selfish natures.  The art of the Bargain among sharers is to give a bit less than you receive.  Giving just enough to perpetuate the relationship with the fellow sharer is often the goal.  This subtle form of cheating is common among sharers in many primate species, including humans.  Whether it is subject to penalty or correction is largely determined by the relative status of the giver and sharer.” [xli]

 

He states that unless the donor of food got back more than he or she gave, the bargain would not be viable.   But if donors get back more than they gave, who bears the constant losses over the longer run?   Unfair sharing reflects a dominance relationship, not a trading imperative and it expresses the art of dominance and not that of the bargain.   Traded exchanges add value to both parties.  It does not impoverish one to the benefit or another; if it did it would eventually extinguishing itself. 

 

As the Ancients thrived, they exchanged social obligations almost on a daily basis, thus dramatically reinforcing cognitive awareness.   Sharing was not a male or female only preserve.  All members of the group entered into quasi-bargains to share food (and sex).    When surpluses were re-distributed, it reduced rancour, envy, and desperate attempts to take what others held onto - better to exchange voluntarily than fight to the death over ‘thieving.’[xlii]  Not that tensions and arguments about who owes what to whom, or who cheated were removed; no known human social arrangement has ever abolished the human capacity to quarrel and to exact ‘revenge’!  

 

The pressure for sharing relates to variance in food acquisition.  The more variant a food source, the greater the pressure to share. Gathering plant food was less variant than hunting small prey, and hunting larger prey was more variant than hunting smaller prey.  Trees or plants stood still, and the Ancients located them without much trouble. Prey moved about and locating them was altogether less reliable.   No matter how skilled anyone was at catching prey, if there was none to catch their skills were redundant.    Living on kills and scavenged carcasses alone would have been too risky – apart from the toxic consequences of eating nothing but meat.    Selection pressure favours food sharing among scavengers, but was weakest in plant foraging, where the inherent variance is low.  Pressure to share plant food between families was less likely though sharing was common within families. Food collected by scavenging or hunting was chance dependent.  Beyond chance, success was dependent on skills (knowing places to find carcasses or prey, knowing how to butcher and to carry quantities of meat back to the family) and on effort.[xliii]  

 

We can be sure that cheating at the margin breached the quasi-bargain in both its weak and strong forms.  Non-reciprocation, the unsolved problem of the weak quasi-bargain, constantly threatened social harmony.   Violent disruptions between would-be co-operators were endemic in the quasi-bargain as in any known social arrangement.  There were always individuals who hung back, made excuses, faked efforts, lied (by gesture, in the absence of language), cheated, exaggerated their contributions, abandoned others in the face of danger, injured or murdered rivals, took more than their share, refrained from assisting those in need, combined with allies to settle disputes and, if male (though not exclusively) maltreated women and their infants.    The quasi-bargain did not – could not – change the incidence of universal character traits. 

 

The strong quasi-bargain was a social arrangement, incomparably beneficial compared to chimpanzee or early hominid alpha-dominance regimes, and well short of perfect as an incomplete transaction, unless enforced tyrannically by some strong-minded males and females.  Such an apparent hostility to, or disregard for the fate of, fellow humans was conditioned by the prospect of starving in an hostile environment at the end of the last Ice Age.  The quasi-bargain, therefore, was not the result of a realisation of the moral benefits of co-operation.  It flourished from the band’s chastisement of cheats and defectors.

 

Real hunger, or narrow escapes from life-threatening dangers, lowers barriers to retribution.   Which individuals felt the brunt of the hostility – those regarded as socially ‘useless’ (aged, injured, sick or defective), or as socially ‘parasitic’ (fit but lazy or cowardly) – likely was a matter of circumstance and personality.  In later millennia, the Moderns resorted to ritualised sacrifices to appease their imaginary and invisible ‘gods.’ 

 

Frederick Nietzsche, the 19th century philosopher, dramatised how humans learnt to keep their promises from the retribution they suffered when they didn’t.  He spoke of the earth ‘soaked in blood thoroughly and for a long time’ as people took their gory revenge on promise breakers. What originally was informal (though brutal) among the Ancients, became ritualised in the culture of the Moderns. [xliv]

 

Evolutionary psychology

Leda Cosmides and John Tooby believe the evolution of socially beneficial adaptations, one of which is social exchange, was critical for the biological evolution of hominids to Homo sapiens in the African savannah.  They write:

 

Without social exchange and the underlying constellation of cognitive adaptations that support it, social and mental life in every culture would be so different as to be unrecognisable as human life.   If one removed from our evolutionary history and hence from our minds the possibility of co-operation and reciprocity – of mutually contingent benefit-benefit interactions arrived at through mutual consent – then coercion and force would loom even larger as instruments of social influence, and positive relationships would be limited to primarily to self-sacrificial interactions among kin.   Such conditions do, in fact, typify the social life of most other animal species.  What psychological mechanisms allow humans to behave so differently? [xlv]

 

Cosmides and Tooby view social exchange, an element of which is identified here as the quasi-bargain, as a ‘cognitive adaptation’.   They assert that the human mind consists of specific adaptations designed to solve the problems that the hominids encountered over millions of years in the Pleistocene in Africa.   For instance, hominids evolved spatial maps of their home ranges and social maps of their relationships to a degree qualitatively more complex than those of non-human primates.  The social maps of the Ancients grew in complexity as selection pressure made it critical to note, analyse and account for and respond to each other’s motives, intentions, emotions, interactions, personalities, histories, threats, promises, reliability in different circumstances and variations in their skills and competencies.   Over time, selection pressure produced a cognitive ability adapted to guide thought and behaviour through the specific problems of the environment and from social contact with other people living in it.  

 

Cosmides and Tooby are adamant that these cognitive abilities were not the result of a generalised all-purpose fully-formed mental faculty that appeared ready made in the human brain – as traditional social science models imply – but were the result of specialised faculties or adaptations evolved by our predecessors during their several million year-long experiences on the open African savannah.   These mental adaptations still function in our modern minds.  They are hardly touched yet by our recent history.

 

Social exchange behaviour is the foundation of the propensity to ‘truck, barter, and exchange’.  Social exchange in the form of the weak quasi-bargain pre-dates Habilis and because chimpanzees practise it today it must be at least five million years old.   Social exchange did not evolve recently like writing and language, the tracks of which we can follow roughly. The cognitive faculty supporting the quasi-bargain lies deep in the socially heritable human psyche.  That is why it is an adaptation that is universal across all human cultures today.

 

The explicit bargain, described by Adam Smith, evolved after the quasi-bargain.  The sequence is important because the importance of recognising the conditional rule (If – Then), either as a receiver of the benefits or as a payer of the costs, is independent of the seriousness or triviality of its content, though the detection and punishment of defection was more critical, the more serious the content.  Lenient regimes were curbed by debilitating defections; tyrannical regimes by self-destruction. By the conditional rule you lived and died.  It became an indispensable construct of the mind that guided the interpersonal behaviour of the Moderns.

 

Social exchange is advantageous whenever there are ‘gains’ from the exchange for the parties engaging in the ‘trade’.  Here we enter a question about the historical generality of Adam Smith’s assertion of the ‘propensity to truck, barter, and trade’.  Some, such as Karl Polanyi, take a highly-restrictive view of what is meant by exchange, asserting that exchange in markets can only apply in commercial society, and can only really be said to have existed from mid-19^th century with the triumph of the capitalist system.[xlvi]  I take a different view through a wider concept of what Smith meant by exchange and I assert that social exchange has roots in pre-history that were part of a wider domain of human interaction than that of a stylised commercial market place. I discuss this process through to early commercial exchanges in more detail in Part 2 of this paper.

 

What became the traditional bargain grew out of the quasi-bargain’s main weakness; reciprocity necessarily delayed completion with a consequential high incidence of uncompleted transactions, leading to a range of outcomes from stoic disregard of defections to severe punishments of defectors.   The known risks of non-reciprocation cautioned the initiation of quasi-bargains. 

 

Reducing the delay between receipt of the benefits and ‘payment’ of the costs was an obvious (in retrospect) first step towards reducing risks of defection.  This promoted, eventually, the introduction of the practice of simultaneity in the reciprocal exchange (the receipt of what one wanted coincided with the handing over what was wanted by the other person). This exchange began the social evolution, first among the hunter-gatherer societies, of the traditional bargain, which accelerated with the evolution of agriculture from about 11,000 years ago and (‘at last’) the emergence of commercial societies and recorded history.