T H E S C I E N C E O F I N E Q UA L I T Y
their families” during lean times. Prentiss’s findings are raising questions about when Keatley Creek’s elites first emerged. So Suzanne Villeneuve, project director of the Keatley Creek Archaeological Research Project at SFU, and her team are now excavating and analyzing new housepit data to re-evaluate the site’s dating. But Hayden insists that in historical hunter-gatherer cultures both in Canada and abroad, aggrandizers build surpluses, amass wealth items, and hold feasts only when food is abundant. “When food is in short supply, no one tolerates other people hoarding,” Hayden says. “The majority simply take what they need because their lives depend on it. Scarcity breeds revolts and demands for more equality.” In contrast, when times are good—for example in a booming modern economy like China (see p. 832)— people seem more tolerant of inequality. HOW THE RICH GET RICHER. While ar-
chaeologists on Canada’s Northwest Plateau probe the origins of wealth, other researchers are examining how it is passed on from generation to generation, perpetuating inequality. Economist Samuel Bowles of the Santa Fe Institute and anthropologist Monique Borgerhoff Mulder of the University of California, Davis, led an international team that studied inheritance in four
types of societies: hunter-gatherers, pastoralists, horticulturalists who planted hand-tended gardens, and agriculturalists who used more advanced technology such as plows or organic fertilizers to boost crop yields. Using historical and ethnographic data on 21 populations around the world, the team examined three kinds of wealth: material riches such as real estate, embodied wealth such as At Keatley Creek in Canada, physical strength, and relational elites arose by controlling rich riches such as the number of patches of resources. people in a person’s social network. They conducted statistical analyses to determine how much of each type of wealth was transmitted. “We reported their findings in a paper in Science counted things like the number of cattle peoin 2009 and a series of papers in Current ple had and their sons had, and we did the Anthropology in 2010. same thing for forms of wealth used by huntThe team found an unexpected difference ers, such as grip strength, which measures between horticulturalists and agriculturalhow strong your forearms are,” Bowles says. ists. Horticulturalists, who tended widely They found that only material forms of scattered fields of domesticated plants, wealth, such as land and livestock valued by scored little higher than hunter-gatherers farmers, were readily handed down to chilin the overall transmission of all forms of dren. “I can pass on my cows to my sons, wealth. That suggests that just having domesbut if I have some phenotypic trait that acticated crops wasn’t enough to fuel enduring counts for my income, like being physically inequality. Farmers who practiced intensive strong, it is less likely that I will pass that on agriculture and boosted yields in regions to my offspring,” says Bowles, whose team where arable land was scarce readily passed
Downloaded from www.sciencemag.org on May 25, 2014
SPECIA L SECTION
Sharing meat helps reinforce equality among the !Kung.
824
By Elizabeth Pennisi
S
eek the richest family in a traditional camp of the Ju/’hoansi/!Kung people of the Kalahari Desert in Africa, and you will almost surely fail. There is no such thing. These huntergatherers traditionally moved periodically and had few possessions. What they had, they shared—food, weapons, property, even territory. The poorest looking hut in a camp likely belonged to the leader, explains anthropologist Richard Lee, a professor emeritus at the University of Toronto in Canada, because leaders try to avoid looking superior. Many anthropologists think this egalitarian lifestyle was an essential feature of hunting and gathering societies. In contrast
with both today’s titans of Wall Street and the alpha males of the great apes, people in these societies “had an ethic of sharing that was central to their way of life,” Lee says. “No one takes precedence over anyone else.” Our species has lived as hunter-gatherers for more than 90% of our history, Lee notes. Today’s economic inequality goes back thousands of years (see main story, p. 822) but in evolutionary time it is relatively recent. Although some of our great ape cousins and arguably our ape ancestors lived in sometimes brutal hierarchies, humans adopted an egalitarian way of life for all but the last 10,000 years. Achieving and sustaining such egalitarianism is not easy, anthropologists say. “The only way you can avoid hierarchies
sciencemag.org SCIENCE
23 MAY 2014 • VOL 344 ISSUE 6186
Published by AAAS
PHOTOS: (TOP) SUZANNE VILLENEUVE; (BOTTOM) RICHARD B. LEE
Our egalitarian Eden
down their wealth. These farmers could control access to their fields, protect them, and leave them to their heirs, Bowles says. He thinks resource concentration is a key factor in explaining inequality among both farmers and the ancient salmon fishers. “Those societies had in a natural state exactly the same kind of concentration of resources that farming made possible everywhere,” Bowles says. “Farming vastly increased the productivity of small patches of land and a small number of animals.” People who owned particularly fertile patches of farmland had a good shot at becoming wealthy
is that you work very hard to head [them] off,” says Christopher Boehm, a cultural anthropologist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Like all animals, humans are born unequal—some run faster, plan better, or make friends more easily than others. And we instinctively want the best for ourselves, even at the expense of others. That sets the stage for some to dominate. To find out why humans shunned hierarchies for most of our history, anthropologists have studied living huntergatherers around the world, including Native Americans and the Ju/’hoansi/!Kung. Iconic studies of these societies show that boasting and other selfaggrandizing behaviors are not allowed. Offenders are teased, ignored, banned from camp, or, in extreme cases, killed. Humility, humor, and strict protocols about distributing meat helped
and passing on that wealth, in part because the land was defendable against others. As agricultural societies developed, so did more elaborate hierarchies, evolving into hereditary chiefdoms and eventually kingdoms. In these complex societies, chiefs and kings came up with new strategies for amassing surpluses and concentrating wealth and power. Many chiefs created economic bottlenecks in trade routes, noted economic anthropologist Timothy Earle of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, in a 2011 paper in Social Evolution & History. These leaders then collected payments from merchants for safe passage and used the surplus to finance specialized warriors to defend and extend their rule. Material culture also became ever more sophisticated, multiplying into innumerable kinds of highly concentrated and easily transmitted forms of wealth, from copper ingots to gold jewelry. All of these trends led to ever greater levels of inequality. By the time of the Romans, a yawning gap separated rich from poor. Historian Walter Scheidel of Stanford University in California and biblical studies scholar Steven Friesen of the University of Texas, Austin, used histori-
keep people on an even footing, says Boehm, who has surveyed the ethnographic literature. For example, !Kung people traditionally downplay their accomplishments: A hunter will say he’s caught only a small skinny animal, even if it’s big and meaty, and his comrades will agree. “You have to demean yourself,” Boehm says. Lee and his colleagues, who observed the Ju/’hoansi/!Kung for years, found that to counter differences in hunting prowess, men exchange arrows before they hunt. The owner of the arrow, not the bowman himself, gets the credit and decides how to distribute the meat while everyone looks on. Other traditional societies have similar customs, Boehm found in an unpublished analysis. Of today’s 330 foraging societies, he examined 56 that live in conditions resembling those of Paleolithic hunter-gatherers.
cal records to calculate the Gini coefficient— a standard measure of inequality in modern societies—for the Roman Empire. The coefficient ranges from 0, in which everyone shares equally, to 1, in which one wealthy person has everything and the rest have nothing. The Roman Empire’s Gini for income was about 0.43, the pair reported in 2009 in The Journal of Roman Studies—close to the 0.49 for pretax income in the United States in 2010. In fact, Rome’s super-rich had wealth on the scale of today’s billionaires. The income of the wealthy Roman triumvir Marcus Crassus equaled about $1 billion per year today, reported economist Branko Milanovic, of the Luxembourg Income Study Center of the City University of New York in New York City, and his colleagues in a working paper in 2007; that’s not quite up to Bill Gates’s more than $2 billion per year. In today’s complex world, there’s no going back to the egalitarianism of some huntergatherers. And yet studies of prehistory may offer some hope for lessening the grip of the 1%, Bowles says. As societies move toward knowledge-based economies, wealth increasingly reflects know-how, social skills, and networking—factors that cannot be transmitted across generations as easily as plots of land or stock portfolios, he says. “So I think the long-term possibilities for a more egalitarian future are certainly there.” ■
Among these groups, having someone other than the successful hunter distribute the meat “is universal,” he says. Several factors prevented the concentration of wealth and reinforced cooperation in these groups. Scattered, unpredictable food resources encouraged nomadism, a lifestyle that ensured no one accumulated many material goods. Cooperative hunting, in turn, yields more than enough meat to go around, and groups that shared equitably were at an evolutionary advantage because all of their members were strong enough to be good hunters or fighters should the need arise, says economist Samuel Bowles of the Santa Fe Institute. And cooperation is self-reinforcing: Sharing the spoils promotes further cooperation and self-sacrifice (Science, 4 September 2009, p. 1196). “Inequality may be the enemy of cooperation,” Bowles says.
SCIENCE sciencemag.org
Boehm also stresses that the behavior of the lower ranks can help quell dominant individuals. In a seminal paper back in 1993, he proposed that several low-ranking men could band together to oust a toogreedy or violent alpha male. He confirmed this idea based on a survey of behaviors of 48 seemingly egalitarian groups. This isn’t a lack of dominance but a reversal of it, he says: “An apparent absence of hierarchy was the result of followers’ dominating their leaders rather than vice versa,” he wrote. Over the millennia, as societies began accumulating surplus food and goods, the inequality held in check for thousands of years re-emerged. Yet humans “have experienced an extraordinary amount of equality,” Bowles says. “The question is whether conditions now will allow us to experience the egalitarianism of the past.” ■
23 MAY 2014 • VOL 344 ISSUE 6186
Published by AAAS
825
their families” during lean times. Prentiss’s findings are raising questions about when Keatley Creek’s elites first emerged. So Suzanne Villeneuve, project director of the Keatley Creek Archaeological Research Project at SFU, and her team are now excavating and analyzing new housepit data to re-evaluate the site’s dating. But Hayden insists that in historical hunter-gatherer cultures both in Canada and abroad, aggrandizers build surpluses, amass wealth items, and hold feasts only when food is abundant. “When food is in short supply, no one tolerates other people hoarding,” Hayden says. “The majority simply take what they need because their lives depend on it. Scarcity breeds revolts and demands for more equality.” In contrast, when times are good—for example in a booming modern economy like China (see p. 832)— people seem more tolerant of inequality. HOW THE RICH GET RICHER. While ar-
chaeologists on Canada’s Northwest Plateau probe the origins of wealth, other researchers are examining how it is passed on from generation to generation, perpetuating inequality. Economist Samuel Bowles of the Santa Fe Institute and anthropologist Monique Borgerhoff Mulder of the University of California, Davis, led an international team that studied inheritance in four
types of societies: hunter-gatherers, pastoralists, horticulturalists who planted hand-tended gardens, and agriculturalists who used more advanced technology such as plows or organic fertilizers to boost crop yields. Using historical and ethnographic data on 21 populations around the world, the team examined three kinds of wealth: material riches such as real estate, embodied wealth such as At Keatley Creek in Canada, physical strength, and relational elites arose by controlling rich riches such as the number of patches of resources. people in a person’s social network. They conducted statistical analyses to determine how much of each type of wealth was transmitted. “We reported their findings in a paper in Science counted things like the number of cattle peoin 2009 and a series of papers in Current ple had and their sons had, and we did the Anthropology in 2010. same thing for forms of wealth used by huntThe team found an unexpected difference ers, such as grip strength, which measures between horticulturalists and agriculturalhow strong your forearms are,” Bowles says. ists. Horticulturalists, who tended widely They found that only material forms of scattered fields of domesticated plants, wealth, such as land and livestock valued by scored little higher than hunter-gatherers farmers, were readily handed down to chilin the overall transmission of all forms of dren. “I can pass on my cows to my sons, wealth. That suggests that just having domesbut if I have some phenotypic trait that acticated crops wasn’t enough to fuel enduring counts for my income, like being physically inequality. Farmers who practiced intensive strong, it is less likely that I will pass that on agriculture and boosted yields in regions to my offspring,” says Bowles, whose team where arable land was scarce readily passed
Downloaded from www.sciencemag.org on May 25, 2014
SPECIA L SECTION
Sharing meat helps reinforce equality among the !Kung.
824
By Elizabeth Pennisi
S
eek the richest family in a traditional camp of the Ju/’hoansi/!Kung people of the Kalahari Desert in Africa, and you will almost surely fail. There is no such thing. These huntergatherers traditionally moved periodically and had few possessions. What they had, they shared—food, weapons, property, even territory. The poorest looking hut in a camp likely belonged to the leader, explains anthropologist Richard Lee, a professor emeritus at the University of Toronto in Canada, because leaders try to avoid looking superior. Many anthropologists think this egalitarian lifestyle was an essential feature of hunting and gathering societies. In contrast
with both today’s titans of Wall Street and the alpha males of the great apes, people in these societies “had an ethic of sharing that was central to their way of life,” Lee says. “No one takes precedence over anyone else.” Our species has lived as hunter-gatherers for more than 90% of our history, Lee notes. Today’s economic inequality goes back thousands of years (see main story, p. 822) but in evolutionary time it is relatively recent. Although some of our great ape cousins and arguably our ape ancestors lived in sometimes brutal hierarchies, humans adopted an egalitarian way of life for all but the last 10,000 years. Achieving and sustaining such egalitarianism is not easy, anthropologists say. “The only way you can avoid hierarchies
sciencemag.org SCIENCE
23 MAY 2014 • VOL 344 ISSUE 6186
Published by AAAS
PHOTOS: (TOP) SUZANNE VILLENEUVE; (BOTTOM) RICHARD B. LEE
Our egalitarian Eden
down their wealth. These farmers could control access to their fields, protect them, and leave them to their heirs, Bowles says. He thinks resource concentration is a key factor in explaining inequality among both farmers and the ancient salmon fishers. “Those societies had in a natural state exactly the same kind of concentration of resources that farming made possible everywhere,” Bowles says. “Farming vastly increased the productivity of small patches of land and a small number of animals.” People who owned particularly fertile patches of farmland had a good shot at becoming wealthy
is that you work very hard to head [them] off,” says Christopher Boehm, a cultural anthropologist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Like all animals, humans are born unequal—some run faster, plan better, or make friends more easily than others. And we instinctively want the best for ourselves, even at the expense of others. That sets the stage for some to dominate. To find out why humans shunned hierarchies for most of our history, anthropologists have studied living huntergatherers around the world, including Native Americans and the Ju/’hoansi/!Kung. Iconic studies of these societies show that boasting and other selfaggrandizing behaviors are not allowed. Offenders are teased, ignored, banned from camp, or, in extreme cases, killed. Humility, humor, and strict protocols about distributing meat helped
and passing on that wealth, in part because the land was defendable against others. As agricultural societies developed, so did more elaborate hierarchies, evolving into hereditary chiefdoms and eventually kingdoms. In these complex societies, chiefs and kings came up with new strategies for amassing surpluses and concentrating wealth and power. Many chiefs created economic bottlenecks in trade routes, noted economic anthropologist Timothy Earle of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, in a 2011 paper in Social Evolution & History. These leaders then collected payments from merchants for safe passage and used the surplus to finance specialized warriors to defend and extend their rule. Material culture also became ever more sophisticated, multiplying into innumerable kinds of highly concentrated and easily transmitted forms of wealth, from copper ingots to gold jewelry. All of these trends led to ever greater levels of inequality. By the time of the Romans, a yawning gap separated rich from poor. Historian Walter Scheidel of Stanford University in California and biblical studies scholar Steven Friesen of the University of Texas, Austin, used histori-
keep people on an even footing, says Boehm, who has surveyed the ethnographic literature. For example, !Kung people traditionally downplay their accomplishments: A hunter will say he’s caught only a small skinny animal, even if it’s big and meaty, and his comrades will agree. “You have to demean yourself,” Boehm says. Lee and his colleagues, who observed the Ju/’hoansi/!Kung for years, found that to counter differences in hunting prowess, men exchange arrows before they hunt. The owner of the arrow, not the bowman himself, gets the credit and decides how to distribute the meat while everyone looks on. Other traditional societies have similar customs, Boehm found in an unpublished analysis. Of today’s 330 foraging societies, he examined 56 that live in conditions resembling those of Paleolithic hunter-gatherers.
cal records to calculate the Gini coefficient— a standard measure of inequality in modern societies—for the Roman Empire. The coefficient ranges from 0, in which everyone shares equally, to 1, in which one wealthy person has everything and the rest have nothing. The Roman Empire’s Gini for income was about 0.43, the pair reported in 2009 in The Journal of Roman Studies—close to the 0.49 for pretax income in the United States in 2010. In fact, Rome’s super-rich had wealth on the scale of today’s billionaires. The income of the wealthy Roman triumvir Marcus Crassus equaled about $1 billion per year today, reported economist Branko Milanovic, of the Luxembourg Income Study Center of the City University of New York in New York City, and his colleagues in a working paper in 2007; that’s not quite up to Bill Gates’s more than $2 billion per year. In today’s complex world, there’s no going back to the egalitarianism of some huntergatherers. And yet studies of prehistory may offer some hope for lessening the grip of the 1%, Bowles says. As societies move toward knowledge-based economies, wealth increasingly reflects know-how, social skills, and networking—factors that cannot be transmitted across generations as easily as plots of land or stock portfolios, he says. “So I think the long-term possibilities for a more egalitarian future are certainly there.” ■
Among these groups, having someone other than the successful hunter distribute the meat “is universal,” he says. Several factors prevented the concentration of wealth and reinforced cooperation in these groups. Scattered, unpredictable food resources encouraged nomadism, a lifestyle that ensured no one accumulated many material goods. Cooperative hunting, in turn, yields more than enough meat to go around, and groups that shared equitably were at an evolutionary advantage because all of their members were strong enough to be good hunters or fighters should the need arise, says economist Samuel Bowles of the Santa Fe Institute. And cooperation is self-reinforcing: Sharing the spoils promotes further cooperation and self-sacrifice (Science, 4 September 2009, p. 1196). “Inequality may be the enemy of cooperation,” Bowles says.
SCIENCE sciencemag.org
Boehm also stresses that the behavior of the lower ranks can help quell dominant individuals. In a seminal paper back in 1993, he proposed that several low-ranking men could band together to oust a toogreedy or violent alpha male. He confirmed this idea based on a survey of behaviors of 48 seemingly egalitarian groups. This isn’t a lack of dominance but a reversal of it, he says: “An apparent absence of hierarchy was the result of followers’ dominating their leaders rather than vice versa,” he wrote. Over the millennia, as societies began accumulating surplus food and goods, the inequality held in check for thousands of years re-emerged. Yet humans “have experienced an extraordinary amount of equality,” Bowles says. “The question is whether conditions now will allow us to experience the egalitarianism of the past.” ■
23 MAY 2014 • VOL 344 ISSUE 6186
Published by AAAS
825
