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Bargain hunters at a sale in New Town Plaza, Sha Tin. Photos: David Wong; Andrea Oschetti

Hoard mentality: what possesses us to possess?

The seeds of materialism were sown millions of years ago, writes Alison George, as she traces the history of our passion for possession

When I moved house recently, I was overwhelmed by the number of boxes containing my family's possessions. It made me feel quite sick.

Even so, I couldn't bring myself to throw any of it out. Possessions define us as a species; a life without them would be barely recognisable as human. Without clothes, a roof over my head, some means of cooking and a supply of clean water, I couldn't survive at all. I struggle to imagine living without a bed, a bath, towels, light bulbs and soap - let alone indulgences and luxuries, and all those objects with sentimental value.

Our closest living relatives make do with none of this. Chimps employ crude tools and build sleeping nests, but abandon them after one use. Most other animals also get by without possessions. And yet we can barely survive without belongings, and seem to have an instinct to accumulate more than we need.

How did we evolve from indigent ape to hoarding human? Answering this question is not easy. For one thing, drawing a line between "possessions" and "non-possessions" is not straightforward: do I own the soil in my plant pots, for example, or the water in my taps? And when I discard something, when does it cease to be mine? What's more, many objects our ancestors may have owned - animal pelts or wooden clubs - don't survive in the archaeological record.

Nonetheless, there are clues about humanity's first possessions. The earliest stone tools, made some 2.5 million years ago, are an obvious place to start. They were designed to do a job, and must have been held by an individual for a time. Yet they were simple and expendable, like chimpanzee tools.

"I doubt there was much concept of ownership," says archaeologist Sally McBrearty, of the University of Connecticut in Storrs, in the United States.

But as tools became more sophisticated, a sense of ownership must have started to evolve. Tools became "possessions" - items that were valued by their owner, carried for a length of time and worth fighting over. For McBrearty, the concept of ownership took off with the advent of spear and arrow heads, which appeared in Africa at least 300,000 years ago.

"They are made to specific designs that vary from group to group," she says. "The spears and arrows took time and effort to make, and were probably the property of a single hunter."

Hunters would have retrieved them from kills, and used them again and again.

Another key early possession was probably fire. Some contemporary hunter-gatherer groups carry embers around with them, and so can be thought of as "possessing" fire. Our ancestors may have done the same thing. The earliest convincing evidence of controlled use of fire dates to about 800,000 years ago.

Clothing, too, made an early entrance. Genetic evidence from body lice that have evolved to live in clothes suggests we started wrapping ourselves up about 70,000 years ago.

Once humans possessed fire, clothing and sophisticated tools, we presumably came to depend on them for survival - especially after colonising colder climates. Our belongings started to become part of our "extended phenotype", as crucial to survival as a dam to a beaver.

With time, there was another leap forward. Objects became prized not only for their utility but also as prestige goods to advertise the skill or social status of their owner. Eventually, certain objects became valued for these reasons alone - jewellery, for example. The earliest evidence of this is a small number of 100,000-year-old shell beads found in Israel and Algeria.

It is clear, then, that tens of thousands of years ago the relationship between people and objects had already evolved beyond utility and survival value. Some archaeologists argue that objects had become part of our sense of self.

"We developed sophisticated relationships with objects that we don't see in other animals," says Lambros Malafouris, at Britain's Oxford University. "You use shell beads to decorate your body - at the same time that becomes part of your self-identity that others will see and recognise."

By the time modern humans reached Europe, about 40,000 years ago, there are clear signs of ownership.

"You can see notches and marks on various items - the notion of ownership is there," says Steven Mithen of the University of Reading, in Britain.

But the amount of stuff that people could accumulate was constrained by their nomadic lifestyle, leading some archaeologists to speculate that bags or papooses might have been among our earliest possessions.

This changed with the switch to a settled lifestyle. Once people chose to live in one place, their possessions began to accumulate.

This lifestyle also heralded a new form of society and economy. Groups became larger and hierarchies developed, with the status of important individuals bolstered by prestige items, such as fine clothes and jewellery. In fact, some archaeologists such as Ian Hodder, of Stanford University, in California, argue that societies could not have become complex and hierarchical without an associated material culture.

This switch to sedentariness drove materialism in another way. Gary Feinman at the University of Illinois, in Chicago, argues that our urge to accumulate stuff is based on a desire to minimise risk.

"When people settled down, they became more susceptible to environmental disaster," he says. A way to insure against this was to store surplus food - a process that created the need for possessions to gather and hoard, as well as the domestication of animals. Another insurance policy was to develop relationships with neighbouring groups. "Exchange of non-necessary goods could grease those reciprocal relationships," he says.

Eventually, when societies became even larger and more complex, material goods became a store of wealth. Trade in such goods eventually led to the development of money.

Of course, there are a number of groups in the world today who don't live in large, complex societies, and who have very few possessions. The hunter-gatherer Hadza people of Tanzania (see Travel, page 68), for example, have few material goods and a culture of enforced sharing. But the vast majority of people don't live like this and, as a consequence, are surrounded by stuff.

So what are the chances of breaking the human habit of owning too much? When you consider our reliance on things to survive and signal social status, it doesn't seem likely.

Aimee Plourde, an expert in prestige goods formerly at the University of Sheffield, Britain, says: "Today we talk of the psychology of bling, of conspicuous consumption, but this taps into a psychology that predates even the formation of wealth. It goes far back."

New Scientist

 

 

Creature comforts

Materialism gave rise to complex civilisation, but what were the first possessions that started us on that path?

A few weeks ago, a small and bedraggled cuddly toy appeared in my house, looking like something the cat had dragged in. When another bedraggled toy appeared a few days later, it became clear it was something the cat had dragged in. She now has four cuddly toys. I think of them as hers - but does she?

In 1776, philosopher Adam Smith noted a curious fact about animals: they don't appear to own things. "Nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog," he wrote in The Wealth of Nations.

In many respects Smith was right. Only humans have a complex system of property and property rights. But some animals do have rudimentary notions of "yours" and "mine". Primates, for example, often show respect for possession. If an individual is holding an object, others, even those more dominant in the group, generally let them keep it. Captive chimps can also be taught a more complex understanding of possession. They are willing to work for tokens that can be accumulated and exchanged for food, and understand the difference between their stash and that of other chimps. But behaviour like that has never been seen in the wild.

Some wild animals arguably do have possessions: birds' nests, beavers' dams, spiders' webs and so on. Squirrels and scrub jays cache food and will often move items to keep them safe. Magpies and bowerbirds collect shiny and colourful objects to attract mates. And many animals defend a territory.

But none of these behaviours come close to the sophistication of human ownership. The reason is simple: language. Without words, mutually understood rules and institutions to enforce them cannot exist. So whatever I think of my cat's toys, it is unlikely she agrees. 

Graham Lawton, New Scientist

 

 

Mine fields

A raggedy blanket, a tatty teddy bear: the dog-eared appearance of many childhood possessions is testament to how dearly they are held. But when and how does this sense of ownership begin?

Even a newborn regards their mother as "special", and will seek out her face and smell over those of other women. By two months, babies begin to understand that they have ownership of their own bodies, while at eight months they start to grasp the concept of loss. By 12 months, they start to form attachments to comfort-objects, such as blankets. Psychologists suggest these provide a temporary substitute for their caregiver.

Also around one year, children start to say their first words, usually nouns such as "bath" and "duck". By 21 months or so a word surfaces that will provide a soundtrack for the coming years: "mine".

Not for nothing are they called the terrible twos: the constant squabbles over possessions are combined with an underdeveloped sense of empathy and a propensity to tantrum. Two-year-olds fight harder for toys when they actually own them, indicating they can distinguish temporary possession from longer-term ownership, says Susan Gelman, who studies conceptual development in children at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, in the United States. "By three years of age they even protest if someone tries to take or throw away someone else's toy, which shows that they understand ownership even when it doesn't involve their own self-interest."

Children's concept of ownership continues to change as they grow older. Gelman's team recently ran an experiment in which two- and three-year-olds were shown three objects; one they were told was "theirs", one which belonged to the researcher and one simply placed beside the others. When the items looked different, two-year-olds had no problem identifying which was theirs, but if they were identical, or their object was less desirable, they would become confused. In contrast, three-year-olds kept track - even when their object was far less desirable than the other two.

This may help to explain why the replacement of a lost "blankie" or teddy bear with a newer model never goes down well: ownership overrides appearance. Indeed, when Bruce Hood, from Britain's University of Bristol, showed three- to six-year-olds a "magic copying machine" that could replicate their favourite toy, most children demanded the original back, and a quarter refused to have it copied at all. Ownership seems to bestow a magical quality that can't be faked - even in young children. 

Linda Geddes, New Scientist

 

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: Hoard mentality
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