by Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus
Rousseau used no data, but is most influential description of the origins of inequality. Now we can know the truth because of archaeology and social anthropology. These two disciplines complement each other. The authors write this book for the general reader. The anthropological selections are from ‘pioneer’ anthropologists and the archaeological ones are from socially-focused work.
When Neanderthals and archaic modern humans lived together, it was not clear who was going to be most successful. Archaeologists believe AMHs were always craftier, but less strong than Neanderthals. During the coldest temperatures of the Ice Age, around 3 kya, Neanderthals vanished.
There was a transition from big game to smaller food sources, like fish, which could be procured because of nets. Through observing nature, they settled on patterns of production that could yield more food.
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. (8)
Altogether, they were naturalists but also in conflict with neighbors. “In other words, our ancestors were behaving more and more like us” (9).
With the Ice Age, people were able to spread across the world, especially through the Sahul Shelf in Oceania and the Bering Strait in Siberia and Alaska.
Differences in skin color can be explained by genetic adaptions to climatic conditions.
The Ice Age receded about 18 kya. This changed the biome of the world from tundrar to a taiga.
In Europe: “Magdalenians”, who, among other things, made Lascaux. They are similar to living foragers. Their story, from ~ 15,000 BC, is the starting point for the story of inequality.
The modern mind emerged, not suddenly, but because of increase in population growth, among other factors; the rise of clans which require artistic production for initiation, for instance, would leave a mark on the archaeological record. Clan-based societies can share more, cooperate more, and thrive better. Compare to the Neanderthals, who probably didn’t organize in Clans, and were evicted by larger groups from the juicy nice lands towards more inhospitable ones. This explanation skirts racism in explaining the Neanderthal decline.
Clans have an “us versus them” mentality that changes the logic of human society. Societies with clans are much more likely to engage in group violence than clanless societies. This fact has implications for the origins of war. Societies with clans also tend to have greater levels of social inequality. Later in this book we will meet societies in which clans are ranked in descending order of prestige and compete vigorously with each other. The germ of such inequality may have been present already in the late Ice Age. (18)