The Creation of Inequality

Kent Flannery, Joyce Marcus

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780674069732
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Antropologia

Our early ancestors lived in small groups and worked actively to preserve social equality. As they created larger societies, however, inequality rose, and by 2500 bce truly egalitarian societies were on the wane. In The Creation of Inequality, Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus demonstrate that this development was not simply the result of population increase, food surplus, or the accumulation of valuables. Instead, inequality resulted from conscious manipulation of the unique social logic that lies at the core of every human group.A few societies allowed talented and ambitious individuals to rise in prestige while still preventing them from becoming a hereditary elite. But many others made high rank hereditary, by manipulating debts, genealogies, and sacred lore. At certain moments in history, intense competition among leaders of high rank gave rise to despotic kingdoms and empires in the Near East, Egypt, Africa, Mexico, Peru, and the Pacific.Drawing on their vast knowledge of both living and prehistoric social groups, Flannery and Marcus describe the changes in logic that create larger and more hierarchical societies, and they argue persuasively that many kinds of inequality can be overcome by reversing these changes, rather than by violence.

I

Starting Out Equal

ONE

Genesis and Exodus

We were all born equal, and our birthplace was Africa. Whoever we are, wherever we live, whatever language we speak, whatever our customs and beliefs, whatever the color of our skin, at some point in the last two million years our ancestors lived in Africa.

It took several emigrations to get us to the four corners of the earth. One exodus, beginning 1.8 million years ago, brought some of our distant ancestors out of Africa but no farther than the warmer parts of continental Eurasia. Joined by African game like the rhino, the hippo, and the elephant, they made it to the northern and eastern coasts of the Mediterranean. From there, some of them reached the Caucasus, while others continued on to India and China. From the Mediterranean, they spread west and north into Europe, reaching the British Isles between one million and 700,000 years ago.

Our distant ancestors did not rush into colder latitudes and had no watercraft capable of reaching places like Australia and New Guinea. But 400,000 years ago they already had wooden spears and throwing sticks for hunting and stone tools for digging, cutting, chopping, and scraping. Innovation does not seem to have been their strong suit. The change in their tools was unimaginably slow, and there is little evidence that they wore clothing or ornaments, imagined a spirit world, or engaged in art or music. More often than not, the raw materials from which they made their tools came from within 30 to 35 miles of their camping places. This would have been about a two-day trip for twentieth-century foragers.

Some 200,000 years ago, the people just described were in decline. The newcomers who replaced them were more “modern-looking” than their predecessors, though far from anatomically uniform. Biological anthropologists see them as consisting of at least two distinct groups of people: those they call Neanderthals and those they call, by that wonderful oxymoron, “archaic modern humans.” Geneticist Svante Pääbo and his colleagues have analyzed more than 60 percent of the Neanderthal genome and compared it to that of modern humans. They conclude that from time to time there may have been exchanges of genes between Neanderthals and archaic moderns.

Of these two types of humans, the classic Neanderthals of Europe were the most powerfully built. Their skeletons indicate that they broke their bones more often than archaic moderns. Classic Neanderthals tended to develop skeletal pathologies in their 20s and 30s, seldom living beyond 40 years of age. Their tooth wear suggests that they sometimes used the mouth as a vise. Some scholars believe that the Neanderthals used strength to perform tasks that archaic moderns performed with improved technology. They argue that as the pace of Stone Age technology sped up, archaic moderns used earth ovens to cook their food longer; developed the spear-thrower, the boomerang, and eventually the bow and arrow; learned how to convert plant fiber into string for snares and fishing nets; began to ornament themselves; and accelerated the improvement of tool kits based on flint, wood, bone, antler, and ivory. All these technological improvements are thought to have reduced the need to maintain larger teeth and more powerful muscles.

Clues to the relations between Neanderthals and their more modern-looking relatives can be found in a group of skeletons buried in Israeli caves. Some skeletons, laid to rest 110,000 to 90,000 years ago, look like archaic versions of ourselves. However, later skeletons from the same Mt. Carmel region, buried only 70,000 years ago, are more Neanderthal-looking. We can draw two conclusions from this evidence. First, at this remote period it was not yet clear which of these two types of humans was going to emerge as more successful. Second, if there were exchanges of genetic material between Neanderthals and archaic modern humans, the Near East is one of the places it might have happened.

As interesting as the skeletons themselves are the details of their burial. One of the archaic modern skeletons, from Qafzeh Cave in Galilee, was buried with possible seashell ornaments and sprinkled with red ocher pigment. Another of the archaic moderns, this one from Skhul Cave in the cliffs of Mt. Carmel, had a wound in his pelvis made by what appears to have been a wooden spear. All this evidence hints that the more modern-looking occupants of the Mt. Carmel caves might have worn shell ornaments, incurred spear wounds from enemies, and received preparation for an afterlife by having their corpses painted red. However, archaic moderns would continue competing with their Neanderthal neighbors for tens of thousands of years.

Beginning at least 100,000 years ago, this competition among early humans took place during a period of global cooling called the Ice Age. Authorities on climate point to evidence that the world’s temperature was falling dramatically 75,000 years ago. The evidence comes from studying deep-sea sediments, air bubbles trapped in glaciers, and grains of pollen from the clays in lakes. The coldest temperatures occurred between 30,000 and 18,000 years ago. Finally, 10,000 years before the present, world temperatures had rebounded, and the Ice Age was essentially over.

To many anthropologists the Ice Age seems like the kind of stressful environment in which a more resourceful type of human—clever, more resilient, and more able to adapt to difficult conditions—might come to the fore. Others believe that such a scenario relies too heavily on the environment. They prefer to believe that our archaic modern ancestors succeeded by using social skills to create larger networks of kinship, alliance, and mutual aid.

THE NEANDERTHALS CHECK OUT

The Neanderthals dispersed widely over the landscape of Eurasia but generally avoided places as cold as Scandinavia. At the peak of the Ice Age, when their environment included reindeer, woolly mammoths, and woolly rhinos, the European Neanderthals often camped in caves, heating their living space with campfires. Their raw materials came generally from within 60 miles of their encampments, double the distance typical of their predecessors. Roughly 30,000 years ago, however, the Neanderthals vanished, possibly driven to extinction by their more modern-looking neighbors.

Edward O. Wilson has pointed out that once our ancestors were left with no closely related competitors, they had achieved “ecological release.” Now they were free to exhibit greater behavioral diversity, uninhibited by rivals to whom they would have to adjust.

THE DISPERSAL OF ARCHAIC MODERN GROUPS

Even before the disappearance of the Neanderthals, our more modern-looking ancestors had been on the move. Now their exodus would carry them to every part of the Old World, and their descendants would eventually colonize the New World and the islands of the Pacific. It is to this emigration of our more recent Ice Age ancestors that we now turn.

To begin with, archaic modern humans seem to have been less heavily built than the classic Neanderthals. They broke their bones less frequently and enjoyed a greater life expectancy. The classic Neanderthal body required plenty of calories for maintenance. Because of their more graceful build and improved technology, more of our archaic modern ancestors could be supported on the same number of calories. Anthropologist Kristen Hawkes has also argued that their greater life span was an adaptation for more intense food gathering. For example, older women could provide child care, freeing women of childbearing age to spend more time harvesting.

The possible results of longer and more efficient harvesting can be seen in its effect on slow-moving prey. Two examples given by archaeologist Richard Klein are the angulate tortoise and a marine mollusk called the Cape turban shell, both native to South Africa. The angulate tortoise grows slowly throughout life. As early as 40,000 years ago, tortoises from archaeological refuse in South Africa had begun to show a steady decrease in size, perhaps because they were now being harvested in such numbers that most did not live to old age. The Cape turban shell showed a similar size decrease, possibly the result of overpicking.

Around 80,000 to 60,000 years ago, two important archaeological sites in South Africa document increasingly sophisticated tool technology. At these two sites, Blombos Cave and Klasies River Mouth, ancient hunters had learned how to convert flint nodules into many more inches of long, sharp blades by using a hammer of softer and more controllable material. They turned some of those blades into scrapers for freeing animal hides from fat. They used chisel-like flints to make slots in bone or wood so that tools could be set more efficiently in a handle. They sharpened bone splinters into awls for perforating hides, allowing for tailoring with string or sinew. They also produced tiny flints that served as barbs for composite weapons.

As early as 80,000 to 70,000 years ago, from Morocco in the north to Blombos Cave in the south, ancient humans had begun drilling seashells to string on necklaces and were decorating themselves with red ocher and white pipe clay, two naturally occurring pigments.

While the humans of 1.8 million years ago had concentrated much of their effort on procuring large-game animals, our more recent ancestors had broadened their idea of food to include fish, perhaps because they now had string for making nets. And one of their most significant improvements in food procurement was recorded at Klasies River Mouth, in archaeological deposits dated from 75,000 to 55,000 years ago.

Klasies River Mouth lies in a zone of vegetation that today’s South Africans call fynbos (literally, “fine bush”). Included among the plants of the fynbos is a flower called watsonia, a member of the lily family. Like its relative the gladiolus, it has a sizable corm, or bulb, which in the case of watsonia is edible. When fynbos vegetation is deliberately burned off, watsonia grows back with its density per acre increased five to ten times. It seems that the occupants of the region had discovered that fact, because some archaeological layers at Klasies River Mouth have dense accumulations of burned watsonia and other fynbos plants.

What is exciting about this discovery is that it reveals the people of that era to have had what economists would call a delayed-return strategy. Rather than restricting themselves to plants or game whose harvest yielded immediate food, the occupants of Klasies River Mouth were willing to invest labor in activities that would yield no food until the next growing season. At that future time, however, their effort would be rewarded by a harvest five to ten times larger than before. To state it differently, some early humans had learned not merely how to take food out of the environment but to engineer the environment itself. Almost certainly they were able to do this because they had become astute observers of nature and, like the nineteenth- and twentieth-century hunter-gatherers studied by anthropologists, could name hundreds of plants and animals and rattle off the details of their habitat preference and behavior.

From that point on, the evidence for human interference in the environment, sometimes called “ecological niche construction,” is repeated at other archaeological sites in widely scattered regions.

Consider, for example, the following case. In the Egypt of 20,000 years ago the level of the Nile River was 50 feet higher than today’s—and rising. At flood stage its surge of water, carried north toward the Mediterranean from Lakes Victoria and Albert, was sufficient to drown the arid canyons that entered it from the Egyptian desert. Just north of present-day Aswan, a dry canyon known as the Wadi Kubbaniya enters the Nile from the west. From June to September the flooding Nile backed up into the canyon’s lower course, submerging all but its tallest sand dunes. This flooding created a rich, localized environment where catfish and tilapia gathered and where water-loving plants like sedges and rushes grew abundantly.

Such is the clamor of spawning catfish that their mouth-and-tail slapping can be heard hundreds of yards away. That sound is probably what attracted groups of Stone Age foragers to Wadi Kubbaniya, where they camped on exposed dunes. As the floodwater receded, tilapia could be caught by hand in their spawning holes, and catfish could be brought to the surface by driving oxygen from the water with kicks and splashes.

The number of fish caught was too many to eat at one time. An expedition led by archaeologist Fred Wendorf found more than 130,000 catfish bones at one camp, along with evidence that the heads of the fish had been removed and the bodies smoked or dried to be eaten later.

By October, as the water fell, dense mats of sedge called purple nut grass were exposed, as were thousands of club-rushes. The sedge mats were ten feet wide, and every ten-square-foot section could produce an incredible 21,200 tubers. The foragers harvested thousands of nut grass tubers with digging sticks and complemented them with the tubers and roasted nutlets of club-rush.

The plant collectors at Wadi Kubbaniya had learned that during October and November the nut grass tubers were small and tender; by February and March they had grown larger and harder and were filled with bitter alkaloids. Even these mature tubers, however, could be rendered edible by grinding them on stones and roasting them. Like smoked fish, the sedge and rush tubers could be stored, and they were high in carbohydrates.

From 19,000 to 17,000 years ago, Wadi Kubbaniya became a rich target for foragers who had developed techniques of drying, smoking, grinding, roasting, and storing, allowing them to stretch the Nile’s temporary abundance into months of food. And like their predecessors at Klasies River Mouth, these people had discovered the advantages of engineering the environment: the greater the number of mature nut grass tubers removed, the more densely the new ones would grow back the next year.

Judging by the skeleton of a young man buried at Wadi Kubbaniya, these fish-and-tuber collectors were anatomically modern, resembling today’s residents of Nubia and the Sudan. The youth had an asymmetrically developed right arm, suggesting that he had been a strong, right-handed spear-thrower. A chip of flint from a past wound was embedded in his shoulder, and a healed fracture of his forearm revealed that he had once used that arm to ward off a blow. His death came as the result of a spear-sized projectile that had left two flint barbs between his ribs and lumbar vertebrae.

Archaeology thus gives us two insights into our ancestors of that era. Both Klasies River Mouth and Wadi Kubbaniya show that they were keen observers of nature, with a rapidly improving technology and the foresight to modify their environment. The spear wounds in the Skhul Cave burial and the Wadi Kubbaniya youth show us something else: even as our ancestors improved their social skills, there were times when neighborly contact resulted in homicide. In other words, our ancestors were behaving more and more like us.

During the second half of the Ice Age, our modern-looking ancestors spread all over the world. This second major exod...