The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire Read Online Free PDF Page A

last stages of the Ice Age, that part of Europe was a cold steppe with dwarf birches and willows.
    Archaeologists call the people of this land and era the Magdalenians, after a site in France. Their dependence on reindeer has been compared to the dependence of the Barren Grounds Eskimo on caribou, which is essentially the same animal.
    The Magdalenians had the cutting-edge hunting technology of 15,000 years ago: bow and arrow, spear-thrower, and harpoon. Reindeer provided them with meat, fat for lamp fuel, skins for clothing and tents, sinews for thongs, and antler and bone for tools. Apart from the reindeer, the Magdalenians hunted wild horse and European bison, trapped Arctic hare, ptarmigan, and grouse, and fished for salmon, trout, and pike. Like the earlier fishermen of Wadi Kubbaniya, they may have smoked fish to lengthen the season of availability. Magdalenians moved with the game, occupying caves in the winter and riverside camps in the summer.
    Some 15,000 years ago, the archaeological evidence reveals a full-blown complement of art, music, and ornaments. The Magdalenians played flutes carved from animal bone, made figurines depicting humans and animals, and decorated themselves with beads and pendants of bone, ivory, and animal teeth. Their most celebrated forays into the humanities, however, can be found on the cave walls of Lascaux in France and Altamira in Spain. There these late Ice Age people painted realistic scenes of deer, bison, mammoth, humans carrying bows, and humans and animals penetrated with arrows. Even the most cautious archaeologists concede that the Magdalenians must be considered fully equivalent to the hunting-and-gathering groups of the recent past. And that opens the door to a huge archive of detailed information on living foragers, collected by anthropologists over the last century.
    Our search for the origins of inequality can, therefore, take 15,000 B.C. as its starting point.
    WHY DOES EVIDENCE FOR A “MODERN MIND” NOT APPEAR EARLIER?
    Most observers agree that the behavior of the Magdalenians reflects a mind as fully “modern” as the one possessed by the archaeologists who dig them up. An increasing number of scholars, however, pose the following question: If anatomically modern humans have been around for at least 100,000 years, making ornaments for 80,000 years, and carving figurines for 25,000 years, why was it not until 15,000 years ago that we finally see overwhelming evidence for a “modern” mind?
    There is no widely accepted answer to this question, but a few suggestions have been offered. One popular view holds that growing population density was the reason. Proponents of this view argue that the ability to generate art, music, and symbolic behavior was probably there throughout the Ice Age but remained latent as long as people were expanding into unoccupied wilderness. Once the world had become more extensively occupied by groups of hunters and gatherers, or so the argument goes, there would have been increasing pressure to use symbolism in the creation of ethnic identities and cultural boundaries. After all, one of the activities that regulate interaction among neighboring ethnic groups is ritual, and ritual often involves art, music, and dance.
    We concede that population growth took place throughout the Ice Age. We suspect, however, that there was another process taking place, one that explains why the archaeological evidence for symbolic behavior appears discontinuous—strong in some localities and weak in others. It has to do with an important difference between two types of hunting-gathering groups, recently emphasized by anthropologist Raymond Kelly. The difference hinges on whether a group of foragers has, or does not have, permanent social groups larger than the extended family.
    In Kelly’s words many foragers—including the Netsilik and Caribou Eskimo of the Canadian Arctic, the Hadza of Tanzania, and the Basarwa of Botswana/Namibia—once manifested “only