Secret of Human Success? Trade

At some point after millions of years of indulging in reciprocal back-scratching of gradually increasing intensity, one species, and one alone, stumbled upon an entirely different trick. Adam gave Oz an object in exchange for a different object...The extraordinary promise of this event was that Adam potentially now had access to objects he did not know how to make or find; and so did Oz.

The claim that Ridley makes in a new book reviewed here, is that Neanderthals had comparable brains to Homo Sapiens but evidence suggests they relied on local resources whereas some 80,000 year old seashells have been found far from the nearest coast, which anthropologists infer to have been used in barter.

I like this because it shines the spotlight on my academic specialty: international trade. But now that I think on it, I'm no longer sure humans were the first species to trade one item for another. There was a BBC article a year ago about male chimps trading meat for sex!