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822 23 MAY 2014 • VOL 344 ISSUE 6186 sciencemag.org SCIENCE

By Heather Pringle

I n 79 C.E., the year Mount Vesuvius de-

stroyed it, Pompeii was not one city

but two. Its wealthiest families owned

slaves and lived in multistoried, sea-

side mansions, one of which was more

than half the size of the White House.

They dined in rooms with costly frescoes,

strolled in private gardens, and soaked

in private baths. Meanwhile, at least one-

third of all Pompeiian households scraped

to make ends meet, with families dwelling

in single rooms behind workshops, in dark

service quarters, or in small houses. Such

economic disparities were common in the

Roman Empire, where 1.5% of the empire’s

households controlled 20% of the income

by the late 2nd century C.E., according to

one recent study.

Inequality has deep archaeological roots.

Yet if existing traditional societies are any

guide, our hunter-gatherer ancestors were

mostly egalitarian (see sidebar, p. 824). How

and when did a few members of society be-

gin to amass wealth?

Farming has long been blamed for the rise

of inequality. Relying on evidence from the

Near East, researchers suggested that the

earliest elites emerged after 10,500 years

ago, when people successfully domesticated

plants and animals and settled in large per-

manent villages. In this view, agriculture led

to the production of surpluses and the emer-

gence of managers, craftspeople, and other

specialists, who eventually gained control

over extra resources.

Now, analyses of archaeological sites as

well as ethnographies of traditional societies

are etching a more complex picture, suggest-

ing that some ancient hunter-gatherers may

have accumulated wealth and political clout

by taking control of concentrated patches

of wild foods. In this view, it is the owner-

ship of small, resource-rich areas—and the

ease of bestowing them on descendants—

that fosters inequality, rather than agricul-

ture itself.

The transition from egalitarianism to

societies rife with economic competition

and inequality was “the single most criti-

cal watershed in the last 2.5 million years

of human history,” says archaeologist Brian

Hayden of Simon Fraser University (SFU),

Burnaby, in Canada. Over time, it paved

the way for the development of “chiefdoms,

states, and ultimately industrial empires.”

BEFORE FARMING. Archaeologists have

spotted the earliest glimmers of inequality

among the Natufians of the Eastern Medi-

terranean, one of the first peoples to embark

on the long transition to farming. Beginning

some 14,500 years ago, the Natufians began

settling at least part-time in small villages

amid rich food resources, regularly supple-

menting their diet of wild game, fruits, and

nuts with wild cereals—a lifestyle that ulti-

mately led to agriculture.

Natufians left some traces of inequality

behind. Archaeologists T. Douglas Price of

the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and PH O

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Luxury villas in Pompeii

were richly decorated

with frescoes, such as

this one showing the

Greek gods Silenus and

Dionysus.

Don’t blame farming. Inequality got its start among resource-rich hunter-gatherers

The ancient roots of the 1%

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Ofer Bar-Yosef of Harvard University exam-

ined published reports for 25 Natufian and

later sites dating between about 15,000 and

8000 years ago. The two looked for standard

archaeological markers of inequality: dis-

parities in grave goods, house sizes, and the

ornamentation of the dead. Not surprisingly,

inequality markers became more common

between 10,500 and 8200 years ago, as early

farmers began sowing domesticated einkorn

wheat and other plants and tending domes-

ticated sheep and goats.

But signals of incipient inequality ap-

peared well before that, between 14,500 and

12,800 years ago, while the Early Natufians

were still hunting and gathering, Price and

Bar-Yosef reported in a 2010 volume. Some

Early Natufian skeletons were richly orna-

mented, but the vast majority were not. The

wealthiest 8%, for example, were decorated

with pendants or marine shells such as

Dentalium, imported or traded from as far

as 400 kilometers away. At one site, three

male skeletons were buried with Denta-

lium headdresses, one fringed with shells

four deep—an impressive display of riches.

Natufians also placed carved artworks in

a few graves, built houses of varying sizes,

and produced large goblet-shaped stone

mortars well-suited for preparing or serv-

ing food at feasts. Making these mortars

“by pecking for many hours is hardly the

business of a fully egalitarian society,” noted

Price and Bar-Yosef.

The findings suggest how people took

a first tentative step on the long road to

inequality. The Natufians lived in an envi-

ronment of abundance—wild cereal grains

flourished in dense patches in the forest, and

game was plentiful. As Price points out, the

Natufians apparently “were harvesting wild

plants in large quantities and storing cereal

grains as well.” He thinks that these stored

surpluses of wild cereals may have given

some Natufian hunter-gatherers an edge

over others. “Those surpluses could allow

people to begin manipulating things, giving

away food and so establishing some domi-

nance behaviors.”

HOLDING ON TO WEALTH. Other abun-

dant, storable wild foods can lead to sur-

pluses, too, and private ownership of these

natural resources could have boosted in-

equality, creating a new kind of “trans-

egalitarian” hunter-gatherer society.

Take an ancient village on Keatley Creek

in Canada’s Northwest Plateau, which was

occupied for part of the year by hunter-

gatherers between 2500 and 1100 years ago.

The village contains more than 115 house

pits, the remains of semisubterranean struc-

tures with log and earthen roofs, and appears

to have had a peak population of as many as

1500 people. The excavation team, led by

SFU’s Hayden, found that the houses varied

dramatically in size, from the square footage

of a microapartment to that of a medium-

sized house today.

To understand these disparities, Hayden

and his colleagues examined ethno-

graphic records of historic ab-

original societies in the

region, which were di-

vided into nobles, com-

moners, and slaves.

The highest status

families owned

certain resources

and passed them

down to their

children: fences

for driving deer

into hunting traps

and, especially,

fishing rocks that

jutted out into the Fra-

ser River, which hosted

some of the world’s richest

salmon runs. Owners built

fishing platforms out from

these rocks, and so could fish

in deep waters where the big-

gest salmon swam. Lower status families

had to fish from public areas along the riv-

erbanks with dip nets, and could reach only

smaller fish. Families then wind-dried their

catch and stored it.

To see if this private ownership of re-

sources extended back in time, Hayden’s

team analyzed fish vertebrae excavated from

house pits of various sizes. As much as 75%

of the fish bone in the large house pits came

from big, 4- to 5-year-old chinook and sock-

eye salmon, laden with calorie-rich fat. In

contrast, 100% of the bone in the two small-

est houses came from smaller, 2- to 3-year-old

salmon likely caught along the riverbanks.

The findings suggest that inequality began

at Keatley Creek some 2500 years ago when

a few ambitious, aggressive people capital-

ized on the salmon’s bounty, Hayden says.

Aggrandizers who wanted more food than

their neighbors likely built fishing platforms

out over key fishing rocks and claimed pri-

vate ownership. These aggrandizers con-

trolled bigger food surpluses than others,

but no one stopped them—as can happen to

those who refuse to share in other hunting

and gathering societies—because there was

plenty of food for all, Hayden says. “It is no

coincidence that the greatest inequalities on

the Northwest Plateau emerged at the most

productive fishing locations, where huge sur-

pluses were produced ethnographically.”

Hayden and his team also found evidence

at Keatley Creek of large roasting pits, one

of which was large enough to cook food

for 500 people. This and other evidence

suggested that aggrandizers at Keatley

Creek organized feasts resembling historic

potlatches, in which a chief cajoled his

clan into producing a cornucopia of food

as well as obtaining prestige goods such as

Dentalium, which these people also

prized: They brought the shells

in from as far as 300 kilo-

meters away, to wear and

to give away to a rival

clan. Such feasts

publicly displayed

the host’s power

and wealth, and

forced rival chiefs

to compete. Pot-

latch guests were

expected to recip-

rocate with goods

of greater value,

and families who

couldn’t come up with

gifts had to go into debt

to get them.

In a study published in

a 2011 volume called Guess

Who’s Coming To Dinner:

Feasting Rituals in the Pre-

historic Societies of Europe and the Near

East, Hayden argues that elites in Natufian

villages may have pursued similar tactics.

Like Price, Hayden argues that long before

farming, Natufian elites could have amassed

large surpluses of food by “owning” natural

concentrations of resources, such as groves

of pistachio trees, or by constructing drive

lanes for hunting gazelles. Massive roasting

pits and hearths at some Natufian sites sug-

gest a feasting tradition, too.

Some researchers think Hayden over-

emphasizes the role of aggressive, competi-

tive individuals in the origins of inequality,

and underemphasizes the role of population

pressures or resource stresses. Archaeolo-

gist Anna Marie Prentiss of the University of

Montana, Missoula, contends that in another

ancient Northwest Plateau village in Canada,

it was a shortage of food, rather than an

abundance, that sparked inequality. Data

from her team’s excavations at the Bridge

River site suggest that the first elites emerged

after salmon runs declined about 1200 years

ago and the village population plummeted,

she and colleagues reported online in De-

cember in the Journal of Anthropological

Archaeology. They found that some families

responded to scarcity by closing off public

access to hunting and fishing resources and

holding feasts to attract workers to their

depleted households, tactics that allowed

them to amass more food than their neigh-

bors. Inequality at Bridge River, Prentiss

says, “came about as a byproduct of feeding PH O

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Since before the Romans, elites

have hoarded wealth in gold.

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SPECIAL SECTION THE SCIENCE OF INEQUALIT Y

their families” during lean times.

Prentiss’s findings are raising questions

about when Keatley Creek’s elites first

emerged. So Suzanne Villeneuve, project

director of the Keatley Creek Archaeologi-

cal Research Project at SFU, and her team

are now excavating and analyzing new

housepit data to re-evaluate the site’s dat-

ing. But Hayden insists that in historical

hunter-gatherer cultures both in Canada

and abroad, aggrandizers build surpluses,

amass wealth items, and hold feasts only

when food is abundant. “When food is in

short supply, no one tolerates other people

hoarding,” Hayden says. “The majority sim-

ply take what they need because their lives

depend on it. Scarcity breeds revolts and de-

mands for more equality.” In contrast, when

times are good—for example in a booming

modern economy like China (see p. 832)—

people seem more tolerant of inequality.

HOW THE RICH GET RICHER. While ar-

chaeologists on Canada’s Northwest Plateau

probe the origins of wealth, other research-

ers are examining how it is passed on

from generation to generation, perpetuat-

ing inequality. Economist Samuel Bowles

of the Santa Fe Institute and anthropolo-

gist Monique Borgerhoff Mulder of the Uni-

versity of California, Davis, led an inter-

national team that studied inheritance in four

types of societies: hunter-gather-

ers, pastoralists, horticulturalists

who planted hand-tended gar-

dens, and agriculturalists who

used more advanced technology

such as plows or organic fertiliz-

ers to boost crop yields.

Using historical and ethno-

graphic data on 21 populations

around the world, the team ex-

amined three kinds of wealth:

material riches such as real es-

tate, embodied wealth such as

physical strength, and relational

riches such as the number of

people in a person’s social net-

work. They conducted statistical

analyses to determine how much

of each type of wealth was transmitted. “We

counted things like the number of cattle peo-

ple had and their sons had, and we did the

same thing for forms of wealth used by hunt-

ers, such as grip strength, which measures

how strong your forearms are,” Bowles says.

They found that only material forms of

wealth, such as land and livestock valued by

farmers, were readily handed down to chil-

dren. “I can pass on my cows to my sons,

but if I have some phenotypic trait that ac-

counts for my income, like being physically

strong, it is less likely that I will pass that on

to my offspring,” says Bowles, whose team

reported their findings in a paper in Science

in 2009 and a series of papers in Current

Anthropology in 2010.

The team found an unexpected difference

between horticulturalists and agricultural-

ists. Horticulturalists, who tended widely

scattered fields of domesticated plants,

scored little higher than hunter-gatherers

in the overall transmission of all forms of

wealth. That suggests that just having domes-

ticated crops wasn’t enough to fuel enduring

inequality. Farmers who practiced intensive

agriculture and boosted yields in regions

where arable land was scarce readily passed

By Elizabeth Pennisi

S eek the richest family in

a traditional camp of the

Ju/’hoansi/!Kung people

of the Kalahari Desert

in Africa, and you will

almost surely fail. There

is no such thing. These hunter-

gatherers traditionally moved

periodically and had few pos-

sessions. What they had, they

shared—food, weapons, prop-

erty, even territory. The poor-

est looking hut in a camp likely

belonged to the leader, explains

anthropologist Richard Lee, a

professor emeritus at the Uni-

versity of Toronto in Canada,

because leaders try to avoid

looking superior.

Many anthropologists think

this egalitarian lifestyle was an

essential feature of hunting and

gathering societies. In contrast

with both today’s titans of Wall

Street and the alpha males of

the great apes, people in these

societies “had an ethic of shar-

ing that was central to their way

of life,” Lee says. “No one takes

precedence over anyone else.”

Our species has lived as

hunter-gatherers for more than

90% of our history, Lee notes.

Today’s economic inequality

goes back thousands of years

(see main story, p. 822) but in

evolutionary time it is relatively

recent. Although some of our

great ape cousins and argu-

ably our ape ancestors lived in

sometimes brutal hierarchies,

humans adopted an egalitarian

way of life for all but the last

10,000 years.

Achieving and sustaining

such egalitarianism is not easy,

anthropologists say. “The only

way you can avoid hierarchies

Our egalitarian Eden

At Keatley Creek in Canada,

elites arose by controlling rich

patches of resources.

Sharing meat helps

reinforce equality

among the !Kung.

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down their wealth. These farmers could con-

trol access to their fields, protect them, and

leave them to their heirs, Bowles says.

He thinks resource concentration is a key

factor in explaining inequality among both

farmers and the ancient salmon fishers.

“Those societies had in a natural state exactly

the same kind of concentration of resources

that farming made possible everywhere,”

Bowles says. “Farming vastly increased the

productivity of small patches of land and

a small number of animals.” People who

owned particularly fertile patches of farm-

land had a good shot at becoming wealthy

and passing on that wealth, in

part because the land was de-

fendable against others.

As agricultural societies devel-

oped, so did more elaborate hier-

archies, evolving into hereditary

chiefdoms and eventually king-

doms. In these complex societies,

chiefs and kings came up with

new strategies for amassing sur-

pluses and concentrating wealth

and power. Many chiefs created

economic bottlenecks in trade

routes, noted economic anthro-

pologist Timothy Earle of North-

western University in Evanston,

Illinois, in a 2011 paper in Social

Evolution & History. These lead-

ers then collected payments from merchants

for safe passage and used the surplus to fi-

nance specialized warriors to defend and ex-

tend their rule. Material culture also became

ever more sophisticated, multiplying into in-

numerable kinds of highly concentrated and

easily transmitted forms of wealth, from cop-

per ingots to gold jewelry. All of these trends

led to ever greater levels of inequality.

By the time of the Romans, a yawning gap

separated rich from poor. Historian Walter

Scheidel of Stanford University in California

and biblical studies scholar Steven Friesen of

the University of Texas, Austin, used histori-

cal records to calculate the Gini coefficient—

a standard measure of inequality in modern

societies—for the Roman Empire. The coef-

ficient ranges from 0, in which everyone

shares equally, to 1, in which one wealthy per-

son has everything and the rest have noth-

ing. The Roman Empire’s Gini for income

was about 0.43, the pair reported in 2009 in

The Journal of Roman Studies—close to the

0.49 for pretax income in the United States

in 2010. In fact, Rome’s super-rich had wealth

on the scale of today’s billionaires. The in-

come of the wealthy Roman triumvir Marcus

Crassus equaled about $1 billion per year to-

day, reported economist Branko Milanovic,

of the Luxembourg Income Study Center of

the City University of New York in New York

City, and his colleagues in a working paper in

2007; that’s not quite up to Bill Gates’s more

than $2 billion per year.

In today’s complex world, there’s no going

back to the egalitarianism of some hunter-

gatherers. And yet studies of prehistory may

offer some hope for lessening the grip of the

1%, Bowles says. As societies move toward

knowledge-based economies, wealth increas-

ingly reflects know-how, social skills, and

networking—factors that cannot be trans-

mitted across generations as easily as plots of

land or stock portfolios, he says. “So I think

the long-term possibilities for a more egali-

tarian future are certainly there.” ■

is that you work very hard to

head [them] off,” says Chris-

topher Boehm, a cultural an-

thropologist at the University

of Southern California in Los

Angeles. Like all animals, hu-

mans are born unequal—some

run faster, plan better, or make

friends more easily than others.

And we instinctively want the

best for ourselves, even at the

expense of others. That sets the

stage for some to dominate.

To find out why humans

shunned hierarchies for most

of our history, anthropologists

have studied living hunter-

gatherers around the world, in-

cluding Native Americans and

the Ju/’hoansi/!Kung. Iconic

studies of these societies show

that boasting and other self-

aggrandizing behaviors are not

allowed. Offenders are teased,

ignored, banned from camp, or,

in extreme cases, killed. Humil-

ity, humor, and strict protocols

about distributing meat helped

keep people on an even footing,

says Boehm, who has surveyed

the ethnographic literature.

For example, !Kung people tra-

ditionally downplay their ac-

complishments: A hunter will

say he’s caught only a small

skinny animal, even if it’s big

and meaty, and his comrades

will agree. “You have to demean

yourself,” Boehm says.

Lee and his colleagues, who

observed the Ju/’hoansi/!Kung

for years, found that to counter

differences in hunting prowess,

men exchange arrows before

they hunt. The owner of the ar-

row, not the bowman himself,

gets the credit and decides how

to distribute the meat while ev-

eryone looks on.

Other traditional societies

have similar customs, Boehm

found in an unpublished analy-

sis. Of today’s 330 foraging soci-

eties, he examined 56 that live

in conditions resembling those

of Paleolithic hunter-gatherers.

Among these groups, having

someone other than the suc-

cessful hunter distribute the

meat “is universal,” he says.

Several factors prevented the

concentration of wealth and

reinforced cooperation in these

groups. Scattered, unpredictable

food resources encouraged no-

madism, a lifestyle that ensured

no one accumulated many ma-

terial goods. Cooperative hunt-

ing, in turn, yields more than

enough meat to go around, and

groups that shared equitably

were at an evolutionary advan-

tage because all of their mem-

bers were strong enough to be

good hunters or fighters should

the need arise, says economist

Samuel Bowles of the Santa

Fe Institute. And cooperation

is self-reinforcing: Sharing the

spoils promotes further cooper-

ation and self-sacrifice (Science,

4 September 2009, p. 1196). “In-

equality may be the enemy of

cooperation,” Bowles says.

Boehm also stresses that the

behavior of the lower ranks

can help quell dominant indi-

viduals. In a seminal paper

back in 1993, he proposed that

several low-ranking men could

band together to oust a too-

greedy or violent alpha male.

He confirmed this idea based

on a survey of behaviors of 48

seemingly egalitarian groups.

This isn’t a lack of dominance

but a reversal of it, he says: “An

apparent absence of hierarchy

was the result of followers’

dominating their leaders rather

than vice versa,” he wrote.

Over the millennia, as societ-

ies began accumulating surplus

food and goods, the inequality

held in check for thousands of

years re-emerged. Yet humans

“have experienced an extra-

ordinary amount of equality,”

Bowles says. “The question is

whether conditions now will al-

low us to experience the egali-

tarianism of the past.” ■

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