Invention of farming
jeudi 7 décembre 2017 à 01:00Farming, which in Europe and Asia stems from an invention around 10,000 years ago, was the cause of hierarchy and inequality.
I've read that farming of tubers in some islands in the Pacific has existed for 25,000 years. I don't know whether that farming also resulted in increased inequality and violence, but I suspect it did: in some places in the early 20th century, "big men" (and other would-be big men) competed to organize their relatives to produce a big surplus. Until European colonizers stopped this, they could use the surplus to recruit lots of followers as a war band to raid neighboring groups.
This doesn't prove that intergroup warfare was nonexistent before farming.