Hoard mentality: what possesses us to possess?
The seeds of materialism were sown millions of years ago, writes Alison George, as she traces the history of our passion for possession
When I moved house recently, I was overwhelmed by the number of boxes containing my family's possessions. It made me feel quite sick.
Even so, I couldn't bring myself to throw any of it out. Possessions define us as a species; a life without them would be barely recognisable as human. Without clothes, a roof over my head, some means of cooking and a supply of clean water, I couldn't survive at all. I struggle to imagine living without a bed, a bath, towels, light bulbs and soap - let alone indulgences and luxuries, and all those objects with sentimental value.
Our closest living relatives make do with none of this. Chimps employ crude tools and build sleeping nests, but abandon them after one use. Most other animals also get by without possessions. And yet we can barely survive without belongings, and seem to have an instinct to accumulate more than we need.
How did we evolve from indigent ape to hoarding human? Answering this question is not easy. For one thing, drawing a line between "possessions" and "non-possessions" is not straightforward: do I own the soil in my plant pots, for example, or the water in my taps? And when I discard something, when does it cease to be mine? What's more, many objects our ancestors may have owned - animal pelts or wooden clubs - don't survive in the archaeological record.
Nonetheless, there are clues about humanity's first possessions. The earliest stone tools, made some 2.5 million years ago, are an obvious place to start. They were designed to do a job, and must have been held by an individual for a time. Yet they were simple and expendable, like chimpanzee tools.
"I doubt there was much concept of ownership," says archaeologist Sally McBrearty, of the University of Connecticut in Storrs, in the United States.
But as tools became more sophisticated, a sense of ownership must have started to evolve. Tools became "possessions" - items that were valued by their owner, carried for a length of time and worth fighting over. For McBrearty, the concept of ownership took off with the advent of spear and arrow heads, which appeared in Africa at least 300,000 years ago.