Dear Mr. Ahiakpor and others,

You have me there!  I meant of course 60 thousand BC, which is the 
approximate figure that people who favor the hypothesis conjure with 
(anywhere from 70 to 40 thousand years ago, as far as an outsider to 
that scholarly literature can make out).

I like Robert Wright's suggestion about non-hard-wiredness.  Otherwise 
we will find trade among bacteria, literally, which doesn't seem a very 
useful way to talk---unless indeed to emphasize the truth that we are 
all interdependent.

And I like John Walker's point about quantification.  That's what Alan 
Page Fiske (Structures of Socal Life, 1991) emphasizes in naming "market 
pricing" as one of his four "elementary forms of human relations."  The 
other three---communal sharing [do you belong to Our Crowd, yes or no?], 
authority ranking [I am the chief, so I get more meat], equality 
matching [we're all in this together, so let's make the amounts of meat 
exactly the same for everyone]---do not involve prices, that is, 
exchange rates between two different things, meat for milk, arrow points 
for cave paintings.

Sincerely,


Deirdre McCloskey