![]() ![]() Our closest living relative, the chimpanzee, shares many social and cognitive behaviors with humans, including reciprocal behavior –, the use of token economies –, and prototypic economic behaviors, , (as do several other ape, and monkey – species).įor instance, chimpanzees participate in reciprocal interactions that span many hours to weeks or months. In order to fully understand the foundations of human economic behavior, it is critical to understand the development of basic behaviors, such as barter. In an autarkic society (that is, a society without barter), economic specialization cannot occur because each individual must self-produce all commodities consumed, or else rely on sporadic gifts. Yet for all its benefits, barter is rarely seen outside of humans and we know little about its development. Although it is costly to each individual to give up something valuable (a bushel of wheat) in order to get back another valuable commodity (a pound of meat), in the end both individuals are better off for bartering because (economists believe) it is cheaper to produce just one commodity than all the different commodities one consumes. ![]() The LRC colony was supported by NICHD HD-38051 and the College of Arts and Sciences, Georgia State University.Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.Īdam Smith famously argued that barter is the foundation of economic specialization, whereby one individual becomes a farmer, another becomes a hunter, and both get richer. The Bastrop colony was supported by NIH/NCRR. MJB was supported by NICHD grant HD-38051, and NSF grants BCS-0634662 and SES 0729244. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.įunding: SFB was supported by NSF grant SES 0729244 and an NIH/NIGMS IRACDA grant awarded to Emory University. Received: NovemAccepted: DecemPublished: January 30, 2008Ĭopyright: © 2008 Brosnan et al. PLoS ONE 3(1):Īcademic Editor: Paul Zak, Claremont Graduate University, United States of America Citation: Brosnan SF, Grady MF, Lambeth SP, Schapiro SJ, Beran MJ (2008) Chimpanzee Autarky. ![]()
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