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His claims run smack in the face of evidence that the child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim gathered while living on Israeli kibbutzes, which themselves are the fruit of old socialist sharing ideals. Bettelheim found that the kibbutz kids were anything but born communists. They started life with a strong instinct for owning personal property that could only be unlearnt through persistent parental programming. In his book, Children of the Dream, Belheim said that the kibbutzism’s lack of private possessions actually damaged their ability to have personal relationships: ‘Nowhere more than in the kibbutz did I realise the degree to which private property, in the deep layers of the mind, relates to private emotions. If one is absent, the other tends to be absent as well.\u2019 Take my knick-knacks, take my soul? I’d like to believe that I’m suspicious of material possessiveness, but then again, if someone walked off with my motorbikes, books, guitars and record collection, my anorakish sense of self would, to be frank, feel mortally dented.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The scientific evidence seems to support Bettelheim. One significant clue lies scattered throughout the artefacts that archaeologists unearth at Neolithic cave sites. It’s hand- axes. Millions of them. Far more than any sensible tool-wielding hominid would ever need. But these aren’t just neatly napped rocks, they are the stone age prototypes of Gucci shoes and Rolex watches. Our Neolithic forebears became highly skilled at crafting lumps of flint into handy tools, but it appears that the implements were not prized only as practical objects for slashing foes or slicing bison. Anthropologists now believe that they served another crucial role as show-off exemplars of design technology, jagged precursors of Philippe Starck lemon-squeezers and Sabatier knives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Honing your tool-crafting skills could turn you into a sexy stone age axe hero, claims the evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller (who warned as in chapter one about the perils of virtual living): “The tools were made in a way that would show off the symmetry, the perfection of the surface, the quality of the craftsmanship,’ he says. ‘They clearly were made for aesthetic reasons. In some archaeological digs they have found tens of thousands of these things. It was runaway competition, as if high fashion was popping up in caves. Miller believes that art in general evolved as a sexual ploy, because it shows off the dexterity, creativity, imagination and intelligence of the maker.<\/p>\n\n\n\n