We focus on a plausible evolutionary continuity between non-human and human primates’ economic behaviour; they show some capacity to barter and even proto-monetary organization

Are the roots of human economic systems shared with non-human primates? Elsa Addessi, Sacha Bourgeois-Gironde. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, December 23 2019. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2019.12.026

Highlights
• Review of extant approaches to non-human primate economic behaviour in terms of several economic paradigms.
• We spell our definitional criteria for what can count of economic behaviour – an issue which is generally side-lined through the application of economic models to animal behaviour.
• We focus on a plausible evolutionary continuity between non-human and human primates’ economic behaviour.
• We report similar cognitive abilities and behavioural performances through a series of individual tasks. As far as individual decision-making is concerned, Prospect Theory is a predictive and biologically unifying model.
• We report behavioural differences between human and non-human primates and between distinct species of non-human primates in cooperative and competitive dyadic tasks (experimental games).
• We report and analyse laboratory and field-experiments showing symbolic activities linked to the use of intrinsically valueless tokens in trading activities.
• Some of these symbolic activities show the capacity to barter and even proto-monetary organization.
• We argue in favour of evolutionary precursors of complex human economic abilities present among non-human primates.
• We, however, point to the relative inability among non-human primates, to exert a joint control over combined cognitive computational and symbolic abilities, which may explain their non-having developing economic sophistication as well as humans.

Abstract: We review and analyze evidence for an evolutionary rooting of human economic behaviors and organization in non-human primates. Rather than focusing on the direct application of economic models that a priori account for animal decision behavior, we adopt an inductive definition of economic behavior in terms of the contribution of individual cognitive capacities to the provision of resources within an exchange structure. We spell out to what extent non-human primates’ individual and strategic decision behaviors are shared with humans. We focus on the ability to trade, through barter or token-mediated exchanges, as a landmark of an economic system among members of the same species. It is an open question why only humans have reached a high level of economic sophistication. While primates have many of the necessary cognitive abilities (symbolic and computational) in isolation, one plausible issue we identify is the limits in exerting cognitive control to combine several sources of information. The difference between human and non-human primates’ economies might well then be in degree rather than kind.