Inequality becomes hereditary
Storable surplus can be owned, defended and inherited — and the graves start to differ.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 1.7 thousand years
- Known to
- ± 500 years
- Era
- Neolithic, Holocene
Foraging societies are not uniformly egalitarian, but durable inequality is hard to sustain without something to accumulate. Grain stores, herds and land are all storable, ownable and heritable, and from the fifth millennium BCE burials increasingly separate into rich and poor, with children sometimes buried richly enough to imply inherited rather than earned status. Varna is the clearest single case. Nearly every later political structure rests on this.