In some families there is a lot of money, in others much less. The emergence of inequality between groups of people has been a long process. According to a group of British archaeologists, the seeds of this lie in the time when our ancestors first started farming. Then the idea of 'hereditary wealth' arose.
The development of agriculture in Europe brought a lot of good to our prehistoric ancestors. Many inhabitants of Europe exchanged their precarious existence as itinerant hunter-gatherers for a life as farmers. They first started to settle in permanent places, after which they were able to develop further at a relatively rapid pace. The agricultural revolution was crucial for the emergence of the first ancient civilizations.
However, this development had an insurmountable side effect. The first farmers quickly realized that not every soil was equally suitable for growing crops. The loess soils in Central Europe in particular were very popular. It literally said:first come, first served. Knowledge of agriculture therefore led almost immediately to growing inequality between groups.
British archaeologists led by Professor Alex Bently of the University of Bristol examined more than 300 human skeletons dating from the early European Neolithic. That era began about 7,000 years ago with the gradual introduction of agriculture on the European continent.
The study found that some of these early European farmers were able to take advantage of significantly more fertile soil than others. Whether or not the farmers were buried together with their agricultural implements proved to be characteristic of this. This week the archaeologists publish their research in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
Analysis of strontium isotopes, a chemical that can tell us how far from his birthplace a farmer had died, showed that the skeletons found with agricultural implements died far less far from their birthplace than skeletons buried without these grave goods. They probably lived near productive and fertile farmland. This gave these men wealth and status.
Women were found to be buried much further from their birthplace. According to the archaeologists in PNAS, this, together with earlier archaeological evidence, points to a system in which the best agricultural land was already inheritable from father to son at the beginning of the agricultural revolution. Men continued to live on the land where they were born. Women often came from other areas and settled on the man's land when she married him.
This primitive system in which access to good agricultural land was unevenly distributed early in the agricultural period laid the seeds for much more far-reaching inequality in later prehistoric times. Some groups were able to erect huge tombs for their deceased leaders, while other tribal elders had to settle for a simple hole in the ground.
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- Agriculture as a disastrous invention