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Origin of social inequality `may be traced back to Stone Age` | Hereditary inequality began more than 7,000 years ago in the early Neolithic era, with new evidence suggesting that
farmers buried with tools had access to better land than those buried without. By studying more than 300 human skeletons from sites across central Europe , Professor
Alex Bentley and an international team of colleagues discovered evidence of differential
land access among the first Neolithic farmers. This is the earliest evidence which
has been found in this context. Strontium isotope analysis of the skeletons, which
provides indications of place of origin, indicated that men buried with distinctive
Neolithic stone adzes (tools used for smoothing or carving wood) had less varying
isotope signatures than men buried without adzes. This indicates that those buried
with adzes had access to closer – and probably better – land than those buried
without. “The men buried with adzes appear to have lived on food grown in areas
of loess, the fertile and productive soil favored by early farmers. This indicates
they had consistent access to preferred farming areas,” said Professor Bentley,
Professor of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Bristol . The strontium
isotope analysis also revealed that early Neolithic women were more likely to
have originated from areas outside those where their bodies were found than men.
This also provides a strong indication of Patrilocality, a male-centered kinship
system where females move to reside in the location of the males when they marry.
Moreover, this new evidence from the skeletons is consistent with other archaeological,
genetic, anthropological and even linguistic evidence for Patrilocality in Neolithic
Europe. The conclusions have implications for genetic modeling of how human populations
expanded in the Neolithic, for which sex-biased mobility patterns and status differences
are increasing seen as crucial. “Our results, along with archaeobotanical studies
that indicate the earliest farmers of Neolithic Germany had a system of land tenure,
suggest that the origins of differential access to land can be traced back to
an early part of the Neolithic era, rather than only to later prehistory when
inequality and intergenerational wealth transfers are more clearly evidenced in
burials and material culture,” said Bentley. “It seems the Neolithic era introduced
heritable property (land and livestock) into Europe and that wealth inequality
got underway when this happened. After that, of course, there was no looking back:
through the Bronze Age, Iron Age and Industrial era wealth inequality increased
but the 'seeds' of inequality were sown way back in the Neolithic,” Bentley added.
This study has been published in PNAS.
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