13 L. Ötzi

Archeologists say human advancement did not come from evolution, a-la Darwin, (larger brain size and such), but it came from bartering and the (relatively) free exchange of ideas.

Once upon a time, a forty-five-year-old, five-foot-two man died crossing the Alps between what is now Italy and Austria. Soon after a storm descended, so his body was sealed and preserved in ice, not to be found again for more than five thousand years.

When German hikers in 1991 found the mummified body of Ötzi, named after the Ötztal Alps, this gave the present an extraordinary glimpse into the past: what Copper Age life was like, how people lived and what they ate. But it also revealed their cultural and economic life.

We don’t know for certain why Ötzi defied the elements and tried to cross the Alps that day, over hilly and snowy terrain at 10,000 feet above sea level. But we do know why he could come as far as he did. Even though he seems to have walked alone, he was never entirely lonely. On his every trip, Ötzi carried the ideas, innovations and work of thousands of people. He benefited from discoveries that he had not made himself and used tools that he had not produced.

His hat was made of bearskin and his leggings and coat were made from goat. His wide, waterproof shoes, designed for walking on snow, had bearskin for soles and deer hide for the top panels. They were so complex that researchers speculate that even 5300 years ago, Europeans had specialized cobblers who made their shoes.

Ötzi carried a kit with flint, pyrite and more than a dozen different plants for making sparks, and he had a fungus for medicinal purposes. He had sixty-one tattoos, which might have been related to pain-relief treatments. He also had flint blade blanks, arrowheads and daggers that he had not produced himself. They were probably created by flint knappers who had spent a long time perfecting their skills. The raw material (flint) was mined from three different areas in the Southern-alpine region, as far as 60 kilometers away. The researchers write: ‘Such variability suggests an extensive provisioning network, not at all limited to the Lessini Mountains, which was able to reach the local communities.’ The metal for his copper axe had not been obtained from ore in the Alpine region, but as far away as Southern Tuscany.

Interestingly, the design of the tools displays influences of both southern and northern Alpine traditions – the arrowheads are typical for Northern Italy, but the end-scraper is similar to the tools of the Swiss Horgen culture. In other words, even five thousand years ago, Ötzi benefited from a highly complex division of labor stretching over considerable parts of the continent – the kind of trade that makes it possible for people to specialize and perfect something, and exchange it for the specialized goods and services of others.

In 2001, an X-ray and a CT scan revealed that Ötzi did not just get lost in the Alps or get caught out in a sudden storm. The image revealed an arrowhead, buried deep in Ötzi’s left shoulder. There was also a cut in his skin that matched the trajectory of that arrow. Subsequently, researchers found wounds to his right hand and wrist, which suggests that he had tried to defend himself against an attacker. He also had traces of clotted blood cells in the brain, indicative of a violent blow to the head. There was DNA from the blood of three other men on his knife and arrowheads. Ötzi did not freeze to death in a snowstorm, as it was first assumed. He was killed in hand-to-hand combat.

We can only speculate on what led to this brutal end. Some think a dispute within the tribe forced Ötzi to flee. Others speculate that their village was attacked by another tribe and Ötzi set off to avenge them. Or perhaps he was just ambushed by strangers. What we do know is that this was not an exceptional fate in his time. The violent death rate among hunter-gatherers was similar to what it is in modern societies during wartime. Until the modern era, the lives of humans were really, nasty, brutish and short.

Those who began to cooperate did it because it gave them a competitive advantage against other animals and against other groups of people. Cooperation made it easier to defeat those who didn’t play well with others. And every group has to find a way to protect themselves against those who are happy to enjoy the loot, but who don’t contribute towards it. It is when we learned to distinguish Us from Them.

Neanderthals on the other hand, lived in small family groups and never associated with others. Their lifestyle remained unchanged for over 200,000 years. For instance, they collected fire from lightening storms and kept it burning, but they never learned how to make fire. Therefore, they had fire in the stormy (lightening) season, but in winter when it went out, they couldn't get it going again until next year.

Homo sapiens are not particularly strong or fast, we don’t have armor, we can’t fly and are not very good at swimming. But we have something else that gives us an overwhelming advantage: we have each other. Because of the development of language and an oversized brain that keeps track of social relations, it became possible to cooperate on a large scale, and so make use of the ideas, knowledge and labor of others. This cooperation enabled the innovations that gave us superior artificial strength, speed and armor, in the form of clothes and medicine. It even made it possible for us to fly and cross the oceans faster than anyone else in the animal kingdom.

Man is a trader by nature. We constantly exchange know-how, favors and goods with others, so that we can accomplish more than we would if we were limited to our own talents and experiences. And it doesn’t take much to get us started. We are constantly on the lookout for opportunities and it’s incredibly easy for us to start a new partnership or collaboration, even with strangers. The sharing of knowledge and goods made it possible for humans to survive and prosper in inhospitable climates all over the planet. This gave rise to science, which is built on the exchange, criticism, comparison and accumulation of knowledge, and rise to technology, which is the application of science to solve practical problems.

The most serious counterarguments against openness are namely worries about how it undermines communities and livelihoods, and how it creates inequality and environmental destruction. These problems are indeed real and serious, but perhaps the only way to deal with them, and continue to make progress, is more openness. Liberty does not give us (there’s no) certainty and control, but it does something more important: it leaves room for the unforeseeable and unpredictable synergy, and that is the only place from which we can expect progress and solutions to our problems.

(This is not my endorsement for one-world government.)