THE REVOLUTIONS OF HUMANITY: DIGITAL HUMANS
The history of money is wrapped up in sex, religion and politics, the things we are told not to talk about. Yet these are the themes that rule our lives, and money is at the heart of all three. The origins of money reflect the origins of humans. As you will see, there have been three great revolutions in human history: we first formed communities, next civilisations and then industry. We are currently living through a fourth great revolution in humankind, with a fifth in the not-so-distant future. And each revolution in humankind, in turn, creates a revolution in monetary and value exchange. That is why it is important to reflect on the past to understand the present as well as forecast the future. To put all of this into context, we need to begin at the beginning and talk about the origins of humans.
THE FIRST AGE: THE CREATION OF SHARED BELIEFS
Seven million years ago, the first ancestors of mankind appeared in Africa. Fast-forward seven million years and mankind's existence is being traced by archaeologists in South Africa where they believe they will find several missing links in our history. A history traced back to the first hominid forms. What's a hominid, I hear you say?
Well way back when, scientists believe that the Eurasian and American tectonic plates collided and then settled, creating a massive flat area in Africa, after the Ice Age. This new massive field was flat for hundreds of miles and the apes that inhabited this land suddenly found there were no trees to climb. Instead, just flat land and berries and grasses. This meant that the apes found it hard to thunder over hundreds of miles on their hands and feet, so they started to stand up to make it easier to move over land. This resulted in a change in the wiring of the brain which, over thousands of years, led to the early forms of what is now recognised as human.
The first link to understanding this chain was the discovery of Lucy. Lucy, named after the Beatles' song āLucy in the Sky with Diamonds", is the first skeleton that could be pieced together to show how these early human forms appeared on the African plains in the post-Ice Age world. The skeleton was found in the early 1970s in Ethiopia by paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson and is an early example of the hominid australopithecine, dating back to about 3.2 million years ago. The skeleton presents a small skull akin to that of most apes, plus evidence of a walking gait that was bipedal and upright, akin to that of humans and other hominids. This combination supports the view of human evolution that bipedalism preceded increase in brain size.
Since Lucy was found, there have been many other astonishing discoveries in what is now called the Cradle of Humankind in South Africa, a UNESCO World Heritage site. It gained this status after the discovery of a near-complete Australopithecus skeleton called āLittle Foot", dating to more than three million years ago, by Ron Clarke between 1994 and 1997. Why was Little Foot so important? Because it's almost unheard of to find fossilised hominin remains intact. The reason is that the bones are scattered across Earth as soil sank into the ground and remains were distributed amongst the porous caves underneath. An intact skeleton is therefore as likely to be found as a decent record by Jedward.
All in all, the human tree of life that falls into the catch-all of the Homo species, of which we are Homo sapiens, has several other tributaries including Homo erectus, Homo floresiensis, Homo habilis, Homo heidelbergensis, Homo naledi and Homo neanderthalensis. The question then arises: if there were several forms of human, how come we are the only ones left?
Some of that may have been due to changing times. After all, there aren't any mammoths or sabre-toothed tigers around today, but there are several forms of their ancestors still on Earth. Yet what is interesting in the order of hominids, according to Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens and a leading authority on the history of humankind, is that Homo sapiens defeated all other forms of hominid because we could work together in groups of hundreds. According to his theory, all other human forms peaked in tribes with a maximum of 150 members, about the maximum size of any ape colony, because with this sized group, too many alpha males existed and the order of the group would fall apart. One part of the group would then follow one alpha male and another part the other.
Homo sapiens developed beyond this because we could talk to each other. We could create a rich landscape of information, not just grunts and signs, and began to build stories. By building stories, we could share beliefs and, by sharing beliefs, hundreds of us could work together in tribes, not just one hundred. This meant that when Homo sapiens villages were attacked by other Homo forms, we could repel them easily. We could also, in return, attack those human forms and annihilate them. And we did. Neanderthals, who share about 99.5 per cent of our DNA, died out 40,000 years ago and were the last Homo variation to survive. After that, it was just us human beings, or Homo sapiens if you prefer.
Now why is this important as a background to the five ages of man? Because this was the first age. This was the age of enlightenment. It was the age of Gods. It was an age of worshipping the Moon and the Sun, the Earth and the Seas, the Fire and the Wind. The natural resources of Earth were seen as important symbols while the birds of the sky, the big cats of the earth and the snakes of the below were seen as key symbols for early humankind.
We shared these beliefs and stories and, by doing so, could work together and build civilisations. One of the oldest surviving religions of the world is Hinduism but there were other religions before Hinduism in Jericho, Mesopotamia and Egypt. Then the Sun God and the Moon God were the basic shared beliefs, and these shared beliefs were important because they kept order. We could work together in larger and larger groups because of these shared beliefs.
This is why there is a lot of commonality of Old Testament stories in the Bible with that of the Qur'an. Jews, Christians and Muslims all share beliefs in the stories of Adam and Eve, Moses, Noah and Sodom and Gomorrah, and even some of these beliefs originate from ancient Hindu beliefs of the world.
Shared beliefs is the core thing that brings humans together and binds them. It is what allows us to work together and get on with each other, or not, as the case may be. I will return to this theme as the creation of banking and money is all about a shared belief that these things are important and have value. Without that shared belief, banking, money, governments and religions would have no power. They would be meaningless.
THE SECOND AGE: THE INVENTION OF MONEY
So man became civilised and dominant by being able to work in groups of hundreds. Eventually, as shared beliefs joined us, they joined us together in having leaders. This is a key differential between humans and monkeys. For example, the anthropologist Desmond Morris was asked whether apes believe in God, and he emphatically responded no. Morris, an atheist, wrote a seminal book in the 1960s called The Naked Ape, in which he states that humans, unlike apes, ābelieve in an after-life because part of the reward obtained from our creative works is the feeling that, through them, we will ālive onā after we are dead."
This is part of our shared belief structure that enables us to work together, live together and bond together in our hundreds and thousands. Hence, religion became a key part of mankind's essence of order and structure, and our leaders were those closest to our beliefs: the priests in the temples. As man settled into communities and began to have organised structure however, it led to new issues. Historically, man had been nomadic, searching the lands for food and moving from place to place across the seasons to eat and forage. Suddenly we settled into larger communities and farmed, thanks to the invention of the plough. This meant that far fewer people were engaged in creating produce and food, and could do other things. It meant that the most powerful individuals could gather others around them and become kings or be designated as the leader of shared beliefs, or a priest in common nomenclature.
Eventually, large cities began to emerge. Some claim the oldest-surviving city in the world is Jericho, dating back over 10,000 years. Others point to Eridu, a city formed in ancient Mesopotamia, near Basra in present-day Iraq, 7,500 years ago. Either way, both cities are seriously old. As these cities formed, thousands of people gathered and settled because the city could support complex, civilised life.
Using Eridu as the focal point, the city was formed because it drew together three ancient civilisations: the Samarra culture from the north; the Semitic culture, whose people had historically been nomads with herds of sheep and goats; and the Sumerian culture, the oldest civilisation in the world. It was the Sumerians who brought with them the earliest form of money.
The Sumerians invented money because their system had broken down. It broke down because humankind was settling into larger groups and farming. The farming and settlement structures introduced a revolution in how humankind operated. Before, people had foraged and hunted; now they settled and farmed together.
Farming resulted in abundance in the good years, but when there was drought, no food was stored because there was no way to encourage farmers to store their over-production in the good years to cover the bad years. So there was a need for a new system and the religious leaders of the timeāthe government if you preferāresponded by inventing money. From the outset, money has been the control mechanism of societies and economies. Countries that have money have respected economies; countries that don't, don't.
So how did the priests make this new belief viable? Sex. There were two gods in ancient Sumer: Baal, the god of war and the elements, and Ishtar, the goddess of fertility. Ishtar made the land and crops fertile, as well as provided pleasure and love.
This was the key to Sumerian culture: creating money so that the men could enjoy pleasure with Ishtar. Men would go to the temple and offer their abundant crops to the priests. The priests would place the crops in store for harder times, insurance against winter when food was short and against crop failure in seasons of blight and drought. In return for their abundance of goods, the priests would give the farmers money. A shared belief in a new form of value: a coin.
What could they do with this coin? Have sex, of course. The Greek historian Herodotus wrote about how this worked:
So money was sacred and every woman had to accept that she would prostitute herself for money at least once in her life. This is why Ishtar was also known by other names such as Har and Hora, from which the words āharlotā and āwhore" originate. It is why prostitution is the oldest profession in the world, and accountancy the second oldest. Money was created to support religion and governments by developing a new shared belief structure that allowed society to overproduce goods and crops, and still get on with each other even in years of drought.
THE THIRD AGE: THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
The Industrial Revolution can more or less be aligned with the emergence of steam power. While the steam age created lots of new innovations, the one that transformed the world was the invention of the steam engine. Moving from horse power to steam power allowed ships to steam across oceans, and trains across countries. It led to factories that could be heated and powered. The range of transformational moments that emerged during this time culminated in the late nineteenth-century innovations of electricity and telecommunications. With the move from steam to electricity, there was a shift from heavy-duty machinery to far lighter and easier communication and power structures. This shift from factories to offices ultimately heralded the end of the Industrial Revolution.
The use of money as a means of value exchange, alongside barter, has been commonplace for centuries or, to be more exact, about 4,700 years. During this time, beads, tokens, silver, gold and other commodities were used as money. Perhaps the weirdest money is that of the Yap Islands in the Pacific where stone is still used as currency.
The trouble is that stone, gold and silver are pretty heavy as mediums of exchange and vulnerable to attack and theft. Thus, as the Industrial Revolution powered full steam ahead, a new form of value exchange was needed. There had already been several innovationsāthe Medici bankers created trade finance and the Chinese had already been using paper money since the seventh centuryābut none of these went mainstream until the Industrial Revolution demanded it.
To address this need for a new form of value exchange,...
