The core of this post is not the American buffalo (an animal once driven to the brink of extinction by European ideology/practices and the diseases of their cows), or Yellowstone National Park (which has been around for a century, and is also essentially a supervolcano that will one day erupt and change the whole way of the world). Nor is this post exactly about the stamps commissioned by the United States Postal Service to commemorate the park's 100th anniversary (the image on one of these stamps, which has a couple of buffaloes standing on the supervolcano, was taken by a local photographer, Art Wolfe).
What interests me instead is the reason for the existence of a postage stamp itself.
This thing did not come into existence just like that, but weirdly like this: Before the middle of the 19th century, which is not a long time ago, there were no stamps at all and mail service in the UK operated under completely different rules. What happened is this: The person who received a letter paid for it. This made sense to everyone at the time because the letter was owned not by the person who sent it but the one who received it. It's your letter. Your name is on it. You must pay for it. The problem with this logic is that the person who received a letter could open it, read it, not like its content, and refuse to pay for it. You paid when you liked what a letter had to say and wanted to keep it. The solution to this problem was to impose the cost of the letter on the sender. This is where the postage stamp comes from. It means the receiver gets the letter and its news for free.
Why bring this up? Because things that appear logical or easy to understand (the sender must pay for the letter) are often the result of complicated and even irrational processes. We do not hit upon easy or the best solutions right away. Something obvious may take years to become something common. This is exactly the point that the 19th century British economic journalist Walter Bagehot made in the second section of his masterpiece on the nature of financial panics and banking Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market (first published in 1873).
In the chapter "Origin of Deposit Banking," Bagehot writes that people assume what works easiest is what...
...would be the most easy to establish, and that what seems simplest when familiar would be most easily appreciated by the mind though unfamiliar; but exactly the contrary is true—many things which seem simple, and which work well when firmly established, are very hard to establish among new people and not very easy to explain to them. Deposit banking is of this sort.
What this helps us understand is how things that seem so natural are often actually the product of very complicated cultural processes and histories (think of capitalism or the market or money). Also, there may not be a deep structure to culture, in the biological sense proposed by Simon Conway Morris. Something that goes extinct in a culture might never be rediscovered. Lastly, what is most obvious or easy may never be discovered at all.
