![]() ![]() Ridley makes a strong case for this thesis. I make the hooks and you catch the fish – and together we achieve something that neither of us could manage on our own. Once we cottoned on to this trick, there was no stopping us. But they never saw the point of making things they could swap. Homo erectus had a large brain and probably a rudimentary language. As he sees it, we owe the forward march of humankind to the benefits of barter. What makes us so different? Why have we come so far so quickly when our hominid predecessors were stuck in a rut for thousands of generations? Matt Ridley has a simple answer. Then we modern humans arrived, and within 100,000 years or so not only devised fish hooks and farming, but steam engines, cellophane and one-click buying. ![]() It never seemed to occur to our erectus ancestors that you could make a better hand axe. If you've seen one hand axe, you've seen them all. Once they started making axes, they stuck to the same design for more than a million years. ![]() We know this because they left crafted stone axes all over the globe. Homo erectus ape-men were avid tool users. ![]()
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