Wealth and poverty are much older than civilization, archaeologists find

<body leftmargin="0" bgcolor="#000060" text="#FFFFFF" link="#FFFF00" vlink="#FF9900"> <table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="95%" height="1"> <tr> <center> <td valign="top" width="33%" height="33"> <b> <p class="MsoNormal"><font face="Arial" size="5">Wealth and poverty are much older than civilization, archaeologists find</font></p> </b> <p class="MsoNormal"><font face="Arial" size="1">Posted May 4, 2005<br> Special to  World Science<br> </font> <b> <font size="2" face="Arial"><br> </font></b> </center> <b><font face="Arial" size="2">A string of recent findings suggests humans began to abandon a sharing lifestyle to form class divisions while they still lived in caves, some archaeologists said. <br> <br> This contradicts a widely accepted view that these divisions—between rich and poor, mighty and weak—arose only thousands of years later, roughly alongside agriculture or civilization. <br> <br> That, in turn, could reshape an debate that has embroiled generations of scientists and philosophers: why social inequality exists at all. The question takes on more-than-philosophical urgency with new findings from public health researchers that inequality may contribute to evils ranging from violence to disease.<br> <br> One answer that may no longer work is the notion, popular at least since when the philosopher Rousseau championed it in the 1700s, that inequality is a basically a scourge of the civilized.<br> <br> Understanding inequality may instead require a new look at Stone Age relics, such as the widely celebrated cave paintings of the epoch, and evidence of secret rituals that may have unfolded in the depths of those caves, argues Brian Hayden of Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia.<br> <br> Hayden is among several archaeologists who said social inequalities became entrenched in the Old Stone Age, generally defined as a period from about 40,000 to 10,000 years ago.<br> <br> Archaeologists traditionally portray that era as one unmarred by social hierarchies, and with sharing as the normal way to allocate resources. This picture, based partly on observations of African tribesmen, is called the simple hunter-gatherer model, Hayden said.<br> <br> “Before 12,000 years ago, people were basically egalitarian,” wrote University of Southern California archaeologist Christopher Boehm in a 1999 book, Hierarchy in the Forest. “They lived in what might be called societies of equals, with minimal political centralization and no social classes. Everyone participated in group decisions, and outside the family there were no dominators.” <br> <br> But the new findings reveal a picture of the period that’s “far removed from the simple hunter-gatherer model,” said Hayden at a conference in Lyon, France, last March. Rather, some Old Stone Age peoples were “complex hunter-gatherers,” who have more elaborate social divisions than simple ones.<br> <br> Some of the first glimmers of entrenched inequality, he said, may have come when shamans huddled together in deep, lavishly decorated recesses of caves to conduct secret rituals. <br> <br> In so doing, he argues, they cast themselves as people with exlusive access to powerful supernatural forces, and thus with rights to privileged roles in their group—essentially a clever scam.<br> <br> And the widely celebrated cave paintings such as those at Lascaux, France, often explained as the product of a sudden leap in human intelligence, actually have a less exalted explanation, Hayden argues. The same forces that produced class divisions, he said, produced other sorts of social institutions, such as specialized labor, including artists.<br> <br> The question of when inequality began is fraught with pitfalls, not the least being how one defines inequality. Defined broadly enough, it has always existed; every social animal has pecking orders. <br> <br> But many archaeologists and historians believe humans brought inequality to new levels. It became “more institutionalized in human societies, and also more elaborate,” said Gary Feinman of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, and editor of the 1995 book “Foundations of Social Inequality.”<br> <br> Why did this occur? Was it a power grab by con artists, like Hayden’s secretly meeting shamans? Or perhaps a smart strategy by groups to coordinate decisionmaking? Most theories tend to adopt one of those two explanations in some form, or fall somewhere in between. <br> <br> Figuring out when it happened is a step toward determining why, researchers believe.<br> <br> According to Hayden’s analysis, the “when” question has a fairly simple answer: as soon as it was possible. Almost as soon as there were enough goods available that some people could get away with keeping a little extra, they did. Almost as soon as social institutions of any kind arose, such as specialized craft and trade groups, class divisions became one of them.<br> <br> Archaeologists have several methods to tell how unequal a given prehistoric culture may have been. One is to check for buried “prestige objects,” such as exotic ornaments that only a privileged few could have afforded.<br> <br> Such evidence is discernible at a 15,500-year-old site in southwest France called Saint-Germain-la-Rivière, argue Marian Vanhaeren and Francesco d’Errico in a paper published in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology’s June issue.<br> <br> A burial there yielded 71 canine teeth of young, male red deer, an animal that was rare or absent in the region at the time, carefully perforated in a standardized way, the researchers wrote. The items, probably necklace parts, strongly suggest social inequality, they asserted, adding: “Our results push back by some 9,000 years the first documented occurrence of this phenomenon.”<br> <br> These findings “certainly can be considered provocative, a challenge to the idea that Paleolithic [Old Stone-Age] societies were unequivocally egalitarian,” Feinman wrote in an email, though he also remarked that Vanhaeren and d’Errico have made “a better case for a degree of social inequality rather than more hardened and inherited social stratification.” <br> <br> Hayden said Vanhaeren and d’Errico are actually not the first to produce evidence against the old image of the egalitarian cave man, but are rather adding to growing pile of such findings. <br> <br> Either way, researchers agree such work may help shed light on why entrenched inequality arose.<br> <br> Hayden hypothesizes it started with clever power-grabbing schemes by a few people. Secret rituals are an “extremely common” version of such a scheme, which also appears in some modern North American hunter-gatherers, he said in his presentation. <br> <br> Hayden interprets as secret ritual sanctuaries the elaborately decorated, deep recesses of some Stone Age caves. An example is the so-called Hall of Bulls of the famously painted caves of Lascaux, France—not from the Saint-Germain-la-Rivière burials, and dating from a similar time period.<br> <br> Such sanctuaries often boast paintings of “power animals” such as bulls and felines, Hayden argues, creatures that tend to figure prominently in secret-society rituals and iconography. <br> <br> Rituals, he adds, are but one possible strategy by which people may have weaseled, threatened or cajoled their way to the top. Throwing feasts was a widespread way to buy one’s way there, he argues.<br> <br> The common thread, he said, is that these people, whom he calls “aggrandizers,” exploited the growing material benefits society was reaping through technology. As there was more than enough food and goods to go around, people could get away with keeping something extra for themselves rather than sharing.<br> <br> Consistent with this, the same sites that provide the first evidence of social stratification tend to provide evidence of the earliest storage pits, he notes. They also have evidence for denser-than-average populations, the result of greater food availability.<br> <br> Other researchers have put a more positive spin on the emergence of inequality, noting that it has benefits, such as fostering better organization among larger groups. <br> <br> “If you go out to dinner with two or three people, figuring out who’s going to take the check, or how you’re going to handle it, rarely is much of a problem,” Feinman said. “But if you go out with 10 or12 people... somebody usually has to become the ‘operator’ or the ‘banker.’“<br> <br> Vanhaeren and d’Errico write that greatly increased human populations around the same places and times where the first evidence of inequality appear support a theory that social inequality helps people boost populations. <br> <br> Hayden puts causes and effects in a different order, by arguing that the same increased food resources that allowed for greater populations also allowed inequality to appear.<br> <br> The difficulties of untangling causes and effects suggest the debate over why inequality may continue for years to come. Even Rousseau’s ideas may stay alive, if, for example, the archaeological findings—rather than refuting any link between inequality and civilization—simply reveal that some aspects of civilization appeared earlier than is traditionally thought.<br> <br> The debate could take a particularly modern urgency with new evidence from the public health field that the social divide is a cause of crime, stress, and even disease. <br> <br> “More unequal societies tend to be more violent,” wrote Richard Wilkinson of the University of Nottingham Medical School in Nottingham, U.K., in the December 2004 issue of the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. “Health is also harmed by greater inequality.” <br> <br> In keeping with such points, Hayden argues, some of the first evidence for organized violence appears alongside that of entrenched inequality. Scalpings and decapitations seem to have taken place at some early feasts, he notes. “In the most extreme cases,” he said in his talk, “we may even be dealing with chiefdoms where slavery existed and humans were occasionally sacrificed.”* * *</font> </p> </b> <p align="left"><b><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#FFFFFF">Send us a <a href="mailto:editor@world-science.net">comment</a> on this story, or <a href="mailto:?Body=http://www.world-science.net/othernews/050724_inequalityfrm.htm">send it to a friend</a></font></b> </p> <center> <p> </center> </td> </tr> </table> </body>