Study of over 1,000 sites suggests inequality emerged long after agriculture

https://english.elpais.com/science-tech/2025-04-15/study-of-over-1000-sites-suggests-inequality-emerged-long-after-agriculture.html

Study of over 1,000 sites suggests inequality emerged long after agriculture

A comprehensive analysis of thousands of homes from the last 10,000 years reveals the distribution of wealth in ancient times

MIGUEL ÁNGEL CRIADO
APR 15, 2025 - 12:07 EDT

It must have been Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), the philosopher and one of the fathers of the Enlightenment, who was one of the first to link the emergence of wealth disparities — both moral and material — with the development of complex societies. This was an argument explained in his Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men.

Later, in the earliest studies documenting the Neolithic Revolution, social scientists established a direct link between the abandonment of the natural state, hunter-gatherer societies, and the beginning of the end of that Eden. In simple terms, they proposed that as humans domesticated plants and animals, they became anchored to the land. From agricultural settlements arose the first cities, where surplus value accumulated, leading to class differentiation, the rise of politics, and eventually, the formation of the first states.

However, a study published on Monday in PNAS — examining the size of around 53,000 houses from more than 1,000 archaeological sites spanning the last 10,000 years — tells a different story: inequality emerged many generations after humans had ceased to be the Rousseauian noble savage.

The study is part of the Global Dynamics of Inequality (GINI) Project, which involves historians, archaeologists, economists, and sociologists. Their goal is to revisit Rousseau’s premise, but with the advanced tools of modern science, three centuries later. The project uses an index currently employed to measure income or wealth inequality within a population.

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