Why people have been giving gifts for thousands of years
Why people have been giving gifts for thousands of years You’d be surprised to know the practical origin of exchanging presents. With the holiday season in full swing, gifts take center stage. But that's nothing new ... because, as it turns out, giving gifts is pretty well embedded in our natures. Dr. Hadas Weiss, an Israeli anthropologist at Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, has found that people who give gifts want to do more than be nice; they want to help society run smoothly. "They want their activities to constitute a society wherein everyone helps everyone else in reciprocal fashion, to everyone's ultimate benefit," Weiss told From The Grapevine. And that's nothing new. In the past, gift-giving was more than just a nice thing to do: it was an integral foundation of society. For instance, everyone knows that before people invented money, they bartered. One person might trade Israeli couscous for, say, her neighbor's freshly