The Day Humans Invented Ownership: Why Anything Can Belong to Anyone

Give a two-year-old a toy, let another child reach for it, and you will hear the word. Mine. It arrives before they can tie a shoelace, before they can count reliably, and well before anyone has explained property law to them.

Nobody taught them that rule. And the rule they are applying, stripped to its logic, is the same one used by a butterfly to settle an argument about a patch of sunlight.

The rule is older than we are

In 1978 the behavioural ecologist Nick Davies published a study of speckled wood butterflies in an Oxfordshire wood. The males compete for spots of sunlight on the woodland floor, which are good places to find females. There are more males than sunspots.

What Davies found is that the contests are not really contests. When an intruder arrives at an occupied sunspot, the two spiral upwards together briefly and then the intruder leaves. The rule is: resident wins, intruder retreats. It holds even when the resident has been in place for only a few seconds.

The way he proved it is the elegant part. If you trick both butterflies into believing they are the resident, the polite spiral turns into a long, escalated fight. The convention was doing all the work, not the fighting ability.

Two years earlier, John Maynard Smith and Geoffrey Parker had predicted exactly this on paper. Where fighting is costly and the thing being fought over is not rare, a completely arbitrary tie-breaker beats fighting, provided everybody uses the same one. Prior possession is available, obvious to both parties, and needs no memory or negotiation. Game theorists gave the strategy a name and the name stuck, but the substance is simple: respecting whoever got there first is cheaper than working out who deserves it.

No law was involved. No state, no language, no species with a forebrain worth mentioning.

Ownership is not a fact about the object

This is the part that sounds like philosophy and is actually the practical core of the whole thing.

Examine a chair as closely as you like and you will not find the ownership. It is not in the wood. Nothing measurable about the object changes at the moment it becomes yours, and nothing changes back when you sell it. What changes is the behaviour of everybody else.

Ownership is an agreement among other people about how they will act towards you and a thing. It is a relationship between persons, with the object sitting in the middle as the subject of the agreement. That is why it has to be enforced, why it can be revoked, and why two societies looking at the same field can disagree completely about who has it without either of them being confused about the field.

It also explains why the butterfly version works. A convention does not need a court. It only needs enough participants to follow it that following it is the better bet.

The mind seems to arrive already holding this

Human beings do not merely accept the convention, they feel it, and quickly.

In 1990 Daniel Kahneman, Jack Knetsch and Richard Thaler ran a set of experiments that have been repeated many times since. Give people a coffee mug and ask what they would sell it for, then ask others what they would pay for the same mug. The sellers consistently want considerably more than the buyers will offer. Nothing has happened to the mug. It has simply been in somebody's hands for a few minutes, and that is enough to change what they think it is worth.

The gap has a name, the endowment effect, and its practical meaning is that losing something you hold registers more heavily than gaining the same thing you do not. Whatever the machinery underneath, it is not a legal instinct. It shows up in people who have never signed a contract, including quite small children.

The first evidence you can dig up

The oldest hard evidence for personal property is in graves, because a grave is where you can see which objects were understood to belong with which person.

At Sunghir, near Vladimir in Russia, burials dated to roughly thirty thousand years ago were laid out with more than thirteen thousand beads made from mammoth ivory, along with carved jewellery, clothing and spears. The beads have been estimated to represent something in the order of ten thousand hours of work.

Sit with that number. That is years of somebody's labour, drilled into ivory, and it was placed in the ground with particular individuals rather than distributed among the living. Two things follow. Personal property existed, and it was not evenly held, roughly twenty thousand years before anybody planted a field.

Then land, which is a different problem

Portable objects are easy. You can carry them, so possession and ownership are nearly the same thing.

Land is not like that, and for most of human existence owning it made little sense. A group moving across a range has no way to exclude anybody from a hillside it is not standing on, and little reason to try. Ownership requires both the ability to exclude and a reason to bother, and foraging supplies neither.

Farming supplies both. Once you have cleared ground, sown it and waited months for a return, walking away is not an option, and someone else harvesting it is a catastrophe rather than an inconvenience. Add storage, and there is a surplus worth guarding through winter. Add inheritance, and the claim outlives the claimant.

This is the point where ownership stops being a convention people carry in their heads and starts needing infrastructure: boundaries, witnesses, records.

The first thing anyone wrote down was an inventory

Which brings us to the object at the top of this piece.

Writing does not begin with poetry, prayer or history. At Uruk in southern Mesopotamia, the earliest clay tablets, from around 3500 to 3350 BCE, carry numbers and nothing else. By the period from roughly 3200 to 3000 BCE the script has become fully expressive, combining pictures of goods, a jar, an ear of grain, a head of cattle, with numerical marks.

Roughly 85 percent of the known texts from the Uruk period are administrative documents. Rations. Livestock. Allocations of labour. Deliveries received and owed.

Humanity's first written words were bookkeeping. The technology that would eventually carry every poem and law and letter ever composed was invented, as far as the evidence goes, because somebody needed to remember who had how much barley.

The tablet in the photograph is exactly that: an account of barley distribution, stamped with a cylinder seal. The seal is the interesting bit. A seal is a mark of authority rolled into wet clay, which is to say a signature, which is to say the moment the agreement stopped depending on anybody's memory.

Rousseau's day did not happen

In 1755 Jean-Jacques Rousseau opened the second part of his Discourse on Inequality with one of the most quoted sentences in political thought. The first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society.

It is a wonderful line and it describes a day that never occurred. Rousseau half knew this, and said elsewhere that even conceiving of property required a long run of prior developments.

What the evidence describes instead is an assembly, over an enormous span, of parts that arrived separately. A tie-breaking convention older than our species and shared with animals that have no idea they are following it. A feeling about held things that shows up in toddlers and in laboratory mug experiments. Portable goods held so unequally that thirty thousand years ago some people were buried under a decade of somebody's work. Then land, which needed farming to be worth claiming. Then writing, invented to keep the score.

The reason anything can belong to anyone is not that a rule was passed. It is that enough people, for long enough, have found it cheaper to accept the claim than to test it. That is what the toddler is relying on, and it is what the seal on the clay was for.

Sources

• Davies, "Territorial defence in the speckled wood butterfly (Pararge aegeria): the resident always wins", Animal Behaviour, 1978 (males contesting sunspots, the resident-wins convention holding after only seconds of occupancy, and escalated fights occurring only when both individuals believe they are the resident).
• Springer, "Bourgeois Strategy" (the Maynard Smith and Parker prediction of 1976 that an arbitrary rule favouring the resident is evolutionarily stable where fighting is costly).
• Wikipedia, "Endowment effect" (the 1990 Kahneman, Knetsch and Thaler mug experiments and the persistent gap between what owners will accept and buyers will pay).
• Wikipedia, "Sunghir" (burials dated to roughly thirty thousand years ago, more than 13,000 mammoth ivory beads, an estimated 10,000 hours of production, and what the grave goods imply about status and inequality before agriculture).
• Wikipedia, "Proto-cuneiform" (the numerical tablets of about 3500 to 3350 BCE, the fully expressive script by about 3200 to 3000 BCE, and administrative documents accounting for around 85 percent of known texts of the period).
• Denise Schmandt-Besserat, "From Accounting to Writing" (the descent of writing from clay tokens used to track livestock and grain).
• Wikipedia, "Discourse on Inequality" (the 1755 publication, the opening of Part Two on the first person to enclose a plot of land, and Rousseau's own caveat that conceiving property required prior developments).
• Wikipedia, "Labor theory of property" (Locke's argument that mixing labour with a thing is what makes it yours).