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

those social groups that are cultural universals, present in every society, and nothing more.” These societies had both nuclear families and extended families, but the extended families rarely persisted beyond the death of the parental pair. Most significantly, families were not grouped into larger units of the type anthropologists refer to as clans or ancestor-based descent groups.
    Other foraging societies, however, did feature larger units, each of which contained many families. The Aborigines of Australia had many levels of units beyond the family. Foragers with lineages, subclans, and clans often do have higher population densities than clanless foragers and have moved beyond the informal ways in which extended families can be organized. Essentially they created large groups of people who claimed to be related, whether this was true or not. For this purpose they used language to extend their terms for different kinds of relatives to a much larger group of people.
    The division of a society into such units can take many forms. Sometimes each unit reckons descent through one gender only, either the father’s line or the mother’s. Early anthropologists, needing a term for such multigenerational units, borrowed the word “clan” from the ancient Scottish Highlanders. In other cases, one social unit may reckon descent from a real or mythical ancestor, without weighing one gender more heavily than the other. Both clans and ancestor-based descent groups can be made up of smaller units called lineages.
    Kelly has reconstructed the way that society might have been modified to create clans. In the case of descent through the male line, for example, the original founding families were most likely headed by the sons and sons’ sons of a set of brothers. In effect, clansmen built upon the bonds that already existed between brothers in clanless societies. Expanding an earlier social premise, that “brothers should hunt together and cooperate with one another,” they established that any brother in an antecedent generation would be considered equivalent to any other, serving as an enduring link between living men and the lineage’s alleged founder(s). Each clan, in turn, was made up of related lineages or subclans.
    Why would the creation of multigenerational lineages and clans during the late Ice Age have escalated the use of art, music, dance, and bodily ornamentation? The answer is, although one is born into a family, one must be initiated into a clan. That initiation requires rituals during which clan secrets are revealed to initiates, and they undergo an ordeal of some kind. To be sure, even clanless societies have rituals, but societies with clans have multiple levels of ritual, requiring even more elaborate symbolism, art, music, dance, and the exchange of gifts.
    Still other rituals are used to establish each clan’s unique identity and to define its relationship with other clans in the same society. Ideas about incest are often extended to the clan level; in such cases, members must marry outside their own clan. When such marriages take place, both the couple and their respective clans often exchange gifts, and the groom may even have to pay a “bride-price.” All these rituals provide contexts in which music, dance, art, the exchange of valuables, and the decoration of human bodies are carried out on a scale beyond that of clanless societies.
    We suggest, therefore, that even without the pressures of growing Ice Age populations, the creation of larger social units would have escalated symbolic behavior—in effect, launching the humanities. This scenario could explain why the archaeological evidence for symbolic behavior appears at different moments in different regions. Simply put, not all Ice Age societies made the transition to units larger than the extended family.
    Among the Ice Age societies described so far, we suspect that the mammoth hunters of eastern Europe may have had clans or ancestor-based descent