The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire (89 page)

Our emotions also play a role in the subordination of our self-interest for the good of the group. Some evolutionary biologists have a problem when individual humans subordinate their self-interest in this way. After all, subordination of self-interest fits poorly with the notion that natural selection operates at the individual, rather than the group, level. What is not clear is the degree to which individuals handicap themselves when they subordinate self-interest by giving away food or valuables. Their generosity will almost certainly result in their being considered superior in virtue, and this superiority can result in more mates and offspring than if they behaved selfishly.

In other words, as long as our behavior results in leaving behind more offspring, it may not matter whether that behavior was directed by genes, by logic, or by unverifiable sacred propositions.

INEQUALITY AND RESISTANCE

There can be no more exciting story for an archaeologist than the way new societies were created from old. A system based on arbitrary premises, in theory, has the potential to give rise to thousands of different societies, and so it did. As we have seen, however, five or six ways of organizing people work so well that strikingly similar societies have appeared in different regions of the world. We recognize those societies in the archaeological record, whether they arose in Africa, Asia, or the Americas.

The similarities among societies in different parts of the world were not lost on early anthropologists. Some even assumed that those societies constituted an inevitable sequence of stages, through which all human groups had passed on their way from foraging to civilization. No one believes such a thing today. In fact, some of today’s anthropologists would even deny that recognizable types of societies exist. Such denials are every bit as misguided as our predecessors’ belief in a monolithic sequence of stages.

Today we know that even when two regions happened to go through similar stages, their social history did not proceed at the same rate. Just look, for example, at the Near East and Mexico. Both regions began to domesticate plants at the end of the Ice Age, perhaps 10,000 years ago. The Near East gave rise to villages with ritual houses 9,000 years ago. The process took longer in Mexico, in part because early corn was not as productive as wheat and barley. There the first villages with ritual houses did not appear until 3,500 years ago.

Once Mexico had developed achievement-based village societies, however, the transition to stratified societies and kingdoms was much more rapid. The first monarchies or oligarchic states in Mesopotamia arose between 5,500 and 5,000 years ago, some 4,000 to 3,500 years after the first villages. The first monarchies or oligarchic states in Mexico arose 2,000 years ago, barely 1,500 years after the first villages.

Why did it take states more than twice as long to develop in the Near East? Did military force play a greater role in Mexico, hastening the shift from “traditional” to “stratified” society in Goldman’s terms? Were the efforts to preserve a level playing field more successful in Southern Mesopotamia, prolonging the period of achievement-based leadership? What roles did sacred authority, expertise, and military prowess play in speeding or slowing social change? Were societies with exclusionary ritual houses more likely to give rise to hereditary elites than those whose ritual houses were open to all?

Archaeologists will not be able to answer these questions until they have better ways of reconstructing the logic of ancient societies. We would like to be able to work out scenarios for a wide variety of societies, providing plausible explanations for why certain varieties appeared so frequently and lasted so long. We suspect, for example, that complex societies could only arise after changes in logic had reduced the pressure to suppress self-interest. Some families or descent groups were then free to place their less successful neighbors in a position of disadvantage. They justified their superiority by claiming special relationships with the very beings who had given humans their laws of behavior in the first place.

We are struck, however, by the fact that each escalation of inequality required the overcoming of resistance. There seems to have been an ongoing struggle between those who desired to be superior and those who objected. That is undoubtedly why some of our most complex and stratified societies formed in a crucible of intense competition among clans, chiefly lineages, and ethnic groups.

Man is born free, Rousseau declared, yet we see him everywhere in chains. We have our ancestors to thank for that. They had dozens of chances to resist inequality, but they did not always have the resolve. We can forgive them for admiring virtue, entrepreneurial skill, and bravery. We simply wish they had not accepted the idea that those qualities were hereditary.

American society, of course, has abolished hereditary privilege, but today we make entertainers and professional athletes into an aristocracy. Many of us go deeply in debt to emulate them, buying countless toys that we do not need. Our celebrities surround themselves with the equivalent of chiefly entourages; we make do with yardmen and undocumented nannies.

Forbidden from mutilating their subjects like Bemba chiefs, American aristocrats settle for hitting their servants with cell phones and coat hangers. Celebrities ease into rehab for crimes that would land most of us in jail. Prevented from practicing chiefly polygamy, they accumulate multiple cocktail waitresses instead.

What can the rest of us do to avoid becoming an underclass? We can remember that Natural Law permits inequality only in strength, agility, and intelligence, and we can resist. The Maliyaw subclan could not become Avatip’s elite as long as the other subclans fought back. The Bear clan could not become a Hopi aristocracy as long as the other clans objected. The Mandan refused to let certain families accumulate all the tribe’s valuables. The Kachin periodically told their thigh-eating chiefs to get lost. And, once in a while, a civilization’s passive majority takes back the privileges of the active few.

We may never be entitled to sumptuary goods, but we can work to increase our virtue. And it is no one’s fault but our own if we allow our society to create “nobles by wealth.” We can resist just as surely as any self-respecting !Kung would do. So the next time a pampered star tells you that his last film made him $20 million, tell him which charity to give it to.

Then explain that you have not actually seen the film, but that you and your dog have discovered that the DVD makes a great Frisbee.

NOTES

SOURCES OF ILLUSTRATIONS

INDEX

Notes

PREFACE

 ix   Numerous editions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s essays are available; two examples are
A Discourse on Inequality,
with an introduction by Maurice Cranston (Penguin, New York, 1984) and
The Social Contract,
with an introduction by Charles Frankel (Hafner, New York, 1951).

  x   Christopher Boehm,
Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior
(Harvard University Press, 1999).

  x   Edward O. Wilson,
On Human Nature
(Harvard University Press, 1978).

xii   Robin Fox, “One World Archaeology: An Appraisal,”
Anthropology Today
9 (1993): 6–10.

CHAPTER 1: GENESIS AND EXODUS

    3   In 2009 the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
devoted part of its volume 106, number 38, to the special feature “Out of Africa: Modern Human Origins.” This consisted of nine articles by Richard G. Klein, Ian Tattersall, Timothy D. Weaver, J. J. Hublin, Michael P. Richards, Erik Trinkaus, John F. Hoffecker, G. Philip Rightmire, and other leading experts on the origins of modern humans. See also Paul Mellars, “Why Did Modern Human Populations Disperse from Africa ca. 60,000 Years Ago? A New Model,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
103 (2006): 9381–9386. Early dispersals of humans from Africa are also discussed by Ofer Bar-Yosef and Anna Belfer-Cohen in “From Africa to Eurasia—Early Dispersals,”
Quaternary International
75 (2001): 19–28, and Michael Bolus and Nicholas J. Conrad in “The Late Middle Paleolithic and Earliest Upper Paleolithic in Central Europe and Their Relevance for the Out of Africa Hypothesis,”
Quaternary International
75 (2001): 29–40.

    4   Neanderthal DNA has been analyzed by an international team led by geneticist Svante Pääbo. See Richard E. Green et al., “A Draft Sequence of the Neandertal Genome,”
Science
328 (2010): 710–722.

    4   Paul Mellars,
The Neanderthal Legacy
(Princeton University Press, 1996).

    4   C. Loring Brace, “ ‘Neutral Theory’ and the Dynamics of the Evolution of ‘Modern’ Human Morphology,”
Human Evolution
20 (2005): 19–38.

    4   Dorothy A. E. Garrod and Dorothea M. A. Bate,
The Stone Age of Mount Carmel,
vol. 1 (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1937); Theodore D. McCown and Arthur Keith,
The Stone Age of Mount Carmel,
vol. 2 (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1932–1934); Erella Hovers, Shimon Ilani, Ofer Bar-Yosef, and Bernard Vandermeersch, “An Early Case of Color Symbolism: Ochre Use by Modern Humans in Qafzeh Cave,”
Current Anthropology
44 (2003): 491–522. See also Paul Mellars, “Why Did Modern Human Populations Disperse from Africa ca. 60,000 Years Ago? A New Model.”

    5   Ice Age cooling is discussed by Paul Mellars in
The Neanderthal Legacy
and by Miryam Bar-Mathews and Avner Ayalon in “Climatic Conditions in the Eastern Mediterranean during the Last Glacial (60–10 ky) and Their Relations to the Upper Paleolithic in the Levant as Inferred from Oxygen and Carbon Isotope Systematics of Cave Deposits,” in Nigel Goring-Morris and Anna Belfer-Cohen, eds.,
More than Meets the Eye: Studies on Upper Paleolithic Diversity in the Near East
(Oxbow Books, Oxford, 2003), 13–18.

    5   Neanderthal extinction is discussed by John F. Hoffecker in “The Spread of Modern Humans into Europe,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
106 (2009): 16040–16045. Ecological release is discussed by Edward O. Wilson in
On Human Nature
(Harvard University Press, 1978).

    6   Kristen Hawkes, “Grandmothers and the Evolution of Human Longevity,”
American Journal of Human Biology
15 (2003): 380–400.

    6   Richard G. Klein, “Fully Modern Humans,” in Gary M. Feinman and T. Douglas Price, eds.,
Archaeology at the Millennium
(Kluwer-Plenum, New York, 2001), 109–135.

    6   Hilary J. Deacon and Janette Deacon, in
Human Beginnings in South Africa: Uncovering the Secrets of the Stone Age
(AltaMira Press, Walnut Creek, Calif., 1999), discuss Blombos Cave and Klasies River Mouth.

    6   The origins of personal ornamentation are discussed by Francesco d’Errico et al. in “Additional Evidence on the Use of Personal Ornaments in the Middle Paleolithic of North Africa,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
106 (2009): 16051–16056.

    7   For the burning of
Watsonia
and other fynbos plants, see Hilary J. Deacon and Janette Deacon,
Human Beginnings in South Africa
(1999).

    8   Fred Wendorf, Romuald Schild, and Angela Close, eds.,
The Prehistory of Wadi Kubbaniya,
vols. 1 and 2 (Southern Methodist University Press, Dallas, 1989). The Wadi Kubbaniya skeleton is described in vol. 1.

    9   The Sahul Shelf, the Sunda Shelf, and the colonization of New Guinea, Australia, and Tasmania are described in James F. O’Connell and Jim Allen, “Dating the Colonization of Sahul (Pleistocene Australia-New Guinea): A Review of Recent Research,”
Journal of Archaeological Science
31 (2004): 835–853. See also Andrew S. Fairbairn, Geoffrey S. Hope, and Glenn R. Summerhayes, “Pleistocene Occupation of New Guinea’s Highland and Subalpine Environments,”
World Archaeology
38 (2006): 371–386.

  10   Elizabeth Culotta, “Ancient DNA Reveals Neanderthals with Red Hair, Fair Complexions,”
Science
318 (2007): 546–547; Rebecca L. Lamason et al., “Slc24a5, a Putative Cation Exchanger, Affects Pigmentation in Zebrafish and Humans,”
Science
310 (2005): 1782–1786.

  10   For human adaptation to high altitudes, see Cynthia M. Beall, “Two Routes to Functional Adaptation: Tibetan and Andean High-Altitude Natives,” in “In the Light of Evolution I: Adaptation and Complex Design,”
Supplement 1 of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
104 (2007): 8655–8660; Mark Aldenderfer, “Modelling Plateau Peoples: The Early Human Use of the World’s High Plateaux,”
World Archaeology
38 (2006): 357–370.

  11   David J. Meltzer,
First Peoples in a New World: Colonizing Ice Age America
(University of California Press, 2009).

  11   Edward Vajda, “A Siberian Link with the Na-Dené,”
Anthropological Papers of the University of Alaska
6 (2009): 75–156.

  11   The date of 15,000 years ago has recently been confirmed by Michael R. Waters et al., in “The Buttermilk Creek Complex and the Origins of Clovis at the Debra L. Friedkin Site, Texas,”
Science
331 (2011): 1599–1603.

  12   John F. Hoffecker, in
A Prehistory of the North: Human Settlement of the Higher Latitudes
(Rutgers University Press, 2005), describes the Gravettians and the site of Gagarino.

  13   Ludmilla Iakovleva, in “Les Habitats en Os de Mammouths du Paléolithique Superieur d’Europe Orientale: Les Données et leurs Interpretations,” in S. A. Vasil’ev, Olga Soffer, and J. Kozlowski, eds., “Perceived Landscapes and Built Environments,”
BAR International Series
1122 (Archaeopress, Oxford, 2003), 47–57, discusses the sites of Kostienki and Sungir.

  13   Olga Soffer, in
The Upper Paleolithic of the Central Russian Plain
(Academic Press, 1985), discusses the site of Mezhirich.