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

groups. It seems even more certain that the Magdalenians had them, and that the painted scenes deeply hidden in the caves of France and Spain were visual aids by means of which initiates were taught the origin myths and accepted behaviors of their social unit. Archaeologist Leslie Freeman points out that some scenes painted in Spanish caves could be seen only after initiates had crept on their bellies through constricted passageways, making the experience a more memorable ordeal.
    Societies with clans enjoy advantages over those without them. They have created large groups of people, claimed as relatives, on whom they can rely for defense from enemies, for amassing the foodstuffs and valuables needed for major rituals, or to assemble the resources needed to pay off a bride’s kinsmen.
    The advantages of clan-based society may even tell us something about the disappearance of the Neanderthals. Neanderthals displayed low population densities and show no archaeological evidence for social units larger than the extended family. In face-to-face competition for territory, they probably stood little chance against archaic modern humans organized into clans. We find this likely because by the twentieth century, most hunting-gathering societies without clans had been relegated to the world’s most inhospitable environments. They were pushed there by groups with more complex social organization.
    The popular press likes to suggest that Neanderthals simply were not smart enough to compete with our more modern-looking ancestors, but that view sounds racist to us. The Neanderthals may simply have gone the way of most foragers who had no social units larger than the extended family.
    Before we begin congratulating our Ice Age ancestors for creating clans, however, bear in mind the fact that they had taken a step with unintended consequences. 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.

 
    TWO
    Rousseau’s “State of Nature”
    Rousseau felt that to understand the origins of inequality, one had to go back to a long-ago time when nature provided all human needs, and the only differences among individuals lay in their strength, agility, and intelligence. People had both “anarchic freedom” (no government or law) and “personal freedom” (no sovereign master or immediate superior). Individuals of that time, which Rousseau called the “State of Nature,” displayed self-respect but eschewed self-love.
    Most anthropologists do not like the phrase “State of Nature.” They do not believe in a time when archaic modern humans had so little culture that their behavior was directed largely by nature. While conceding that the capacity for culture is the result of natural selection, anthropologists argue that humans themselves determine the content of their culture. Many anthropologists, therefore, bristle when evolutionary psychologists presume to tell them which parts of human social behavior are “hardwired into the cerebral cortex.”
    Suppose, however, that we pose a less controversial question to anthropologists: What form of human society, because of its highly egalitarian nature, best serves as a starting point for the study of inequality? In that case, many anthropologists would answer, “those hunting-and-gathering societies that possess no groupings larger than the extended family.”
    In this chapter we examine four such societies: the traditional Caribou and Netsilik Eskimo, who lived in a setting as cold as Ice Age Europe, and the traditional Basarwa