Coevolution of farming and private property during the early Holocene

Bibliographic Data

ID23319660
AuthorsSamuel Bowle (0000-0001-6068-4430, Santa Fe Institute), Samuel Bowles (Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, NM 87501; and), Jung-Kyoo Choi (Kyungpook National University)
Year2013
Volume110
Issue22
Pages8830-8835
Publication date2013-05-28
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0027-8424 • E-ISSN: 1091-6490
PublisherNational Academy of Sciences (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1073/pnas.1212149110
PMID23671111
PMCIDPMC3670368
OpenAlexW2093046577
LanguageEN
Citations received80
References cited38

The advent of farming around 12 millennia ago was a cultural as well as technological revolution, requiring a new system of property rights. Among mobile hunter–gatherers during the late Pleistocene, food was almost certainly widely shared as it was acquired. If a harvested crop or the meat of a domesticated animal were to have been distributed to other group members, a late Pleistocene would-be farmer would have had little incentive to engage in the required investments in clearing, cultivation, animal tending, and storage. However, the new property rights that farming required—secure individual claims to the products of one’s labor—were infeasible because most of the mobile and dispersed resources of a forager economy could not cost-effectively be delimited and defended. The resulting chicken-and-egg puzzle might be resolved if farming had been much more productive than foraging, but initially it was not. Our model and simulations explain how, despite being an unlikely event, farming and a new system of farming-friendly property rights nonetheless jointly emerged when they did. This Holocene revolution was not sparked by a superior technology. It occurred because possession of the wealth of farmers—crops, dwellings, and animals—could be unambiguously demarcated and defended. This facilitated the spread of new property rights that were advantageous to the groups adopting them. Our results thus challenge unicausal models of historical dynamics driven by advances in technology, population pressure, or other exogenous changes. Our approach may be applied to other technological and institutional revolutions such as the 18th- and 19th-century industrial revolution and the information revolution today.

Agriculture · Biology · Business · Domestication · Economics · Economy · Incentive · Market economy · Natural resource economics · Political science · Population · Possession (linguistics) · Private property · Property rights · Sociology · Archaeology and ancient environmental studies · Ecology · Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation · Language and cultural evolution · Law

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