Hawk Dove Game and the Evolution of Property Rights

The First Property Rights Revolution

In their paper, The First Property Rights Revolution, Samual Bowels and Jung-Kyoo Choi attempt to explain the emergence of individual property rights, which replaced the "collectivist and egalitarian social structures" common to mobile foraging bands. A key element in this investigation is why property rights only emerged about 11,000 years ago with the domestication of plants and animals, and how they were able to evolve without the aid of states which did not appear until many millenia later. From archaological evidence and recent behavioral experiments it is clear that sharing norms existed as early as 100,000 years ago, and that the lives of these mobile hunter-gatherers were regulated by social norms and collective punishment of violators of these norms. These norms most likely applied to certain items, like large game, which were available sporadically and in large quantities.

"In these ... communities, group sanction emerged as the most powerful instrument for regulation of individually assertive behaviors, particularly those which obviously disrupted cooperation or disturbed social equilibrium needed for group stability."

In addition, humans are not unique in having property rights. Many species of spiders and the male Hamadryas baboons respect prior possession of sites and objects by individuals of the same species. These facts are puzzling in the face of explainations which present property rights as a way to minimize the waste from conflict, but cannot explain why property rights did not develop nearly 100,000 years earlier.