The Holy Roman Church dominated Medieval Europe at the expense of their adherents, while “nobility” grew rich off the backs of their serfs. Even colonial America was largely run by rich landowners who, when levied with taxes by the British, whipped the poor into a frenzy to go fight a revolution. However, it’s not known just how far back these kinds of systemic inequities have been present in human civilization. A recent feature in Wired attempts to answer that question.
The Agricultural Revolution, dated back some 11,000 years, are commonly thought by anthropologists to be the beginning of systematic social hierarchies (and thus the beginning of inequalities in those hierarchies). As people learned to grow and harvest food, they had to stay in one place, creating condensed populations that required “managing.”
It was with this advent, the true beginning of human civilization, that a few people consolidated power over larger numbers of others around the accessibility and control of the food supply. This is substantiated by the unearthing of graves from this time, where small numbers of people were buried with larger numbers of “grave goods” (pottery, weapons, furs, etc.) than the rest. However, there was little to show that heredity or inheritance were defined.
About 8,500 years ago a farming culture referred to as the Linearbandkeramik (LBK) moved into eastern Europe, and spread across the continent to present-day Paris, France in as little as 500 years. It was subsequently replaced by other cultures, but there’s significant evidence to show that LBK was socially stratified. Researchers unearthed several cemeteries from this period, known as the European Neolithic.
Since power was organized around control of food, researchers looked principally at unearthed bodies’ teeth. Particularly they looked at the presence of strontium, an element present more in loess soils and less in non-loess soils; non-loess soils being more fertile. They then correlated this data with the number of adzes, a Neolithic digging tool that was considered a sign of the wealth of the individual.
The findings show that men with more adzes did seem to have more access to fertile fields, implying a stronger crop and more relative wealth. In addition, they found that men with adzes tended to be related, showing that more fertile land was inherited from fathers before. In addition, researchers found that women tended to grow up in less fertile areas, and had a much higher difference in the strontium present in their teeth.
This indicates that men in the LBK were sedentary, staying with their farmland, while women tended to move around more looking for better matches. Social mobility, thus, tended to take place at a increase rate for females, than for males, presumably through marriages.