The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire (4 page)

At least 20 houses of this era, sometimes clustered in groups of three or four, have so far been found in Ukraine and Russia. They remind some scholars of the whalebone houses built by the twentieth-century Eskimo. In addition to butchering mammoths and trapping fur-bearing mammals, these ancient occupants of the taiga had turned orphaned wolves into companion animals. They may deserve credit for creating the world’s first dog, or, if one prefers, Ice Age man’s best friend.

Raw materials used by the occupants of Mezhirich came from a distance. Some of their chipped stone was quartz crystal, brought 60 miles from the southeast; some beads were of amber, brought 60 miles from the northwest; still other beads were of fossil marine shell, brought 200 miles from the south. The distances involved make it likely that these materials were being traded from group to group.

With art (and perhaps hunting magic) already documented, let us now move westward into Spain, France, Belgium, and Germany. Some 15,000 years ago, during the 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 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 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 and Hadza, who lived in a world of African game like many of our earliest ancestors. We do not look at the twenty-first-century descendants of those ethnic groups; we look, instead, at the way they lived when anthropologists first contacted them. The less altered by contact with Western civilization any foraging group was when first described, the more useful that group’s description is to our reconstruction of ancient life.

Some of the first Westerners to visit clanless foragers considered them Stone Age people frozen in time. This idea was so naïve and demeaning that it triggered a backlash. Soon revisionists were claiming that recent foragers can tell us nothing about the past, because they are merely the victims of expanding civilization. That revisionism went too far, and now the pendulum is swinging back to a more balanced position.

Some of the most eloquent spokespersons for the balanced position are anthropologists who have spent years among foragers. The late Ernest S. (“Tiger”) Burch Jr., who devoted a lifetime to Arctic hunters, conceded that the industrialized nations’ tendency to swallow up ethnic minorities has left few foraging societies unaltered. This situation does not mean, however, that we cannot make use of recent foragers to understand their prehistoric counterparts. What we need to do, according to Burch, is to select a distinct form of society—clanless foragers would be one example—and create a model of that society that can be compared to both ancient and modern groups. If we do our work well, some aspects of our model should apply to all clanless foragers, regardless of when they lived. In other words, if one finds that the foragers of 10,000 years ago were doing something that their counterparts were still doing in the year 1900, that behavior can hardly have resulted from the impact of Western civilization.