Gap between rich and poor began 7,000 years ago, say scientists
The gap between rich and poor began 7,000 years ago… when land became worth more than people, say scientists.
Farmers began using ox drawn ploughs to reap crops rather than their hands and also the class system was born.
It enabled them to grow ten times more cereals and vegetables without needing extra workers, based on new research.
Those who owned land and ox teams also started to go for more stress-tolerant crops, like barley or some types of wheat, that didn’t require much labour.
By the second millennium BC, in many farming landscapes fields stretched towards the horizon.
Societies were deeply divided between wealthy landowners, who passed their holdings on to their kids and land-poor or landless families.
Co author Professor Samuel Bowles, an economist in the Santa Fe Institute, Boise state broncos, explained: “Ox drawn ploughs were the robots from the late Neolithic.”
The oxen were a form of technology that separated wealth from labour – a fundamental development in the inequality we see today.
Prof Bowles said: “The result was just like today – growing economic disparities between people who owned the robots and people whose work the robots displaced.”
The finding published in Antiquity contributes to growing evidence that lasting divisions between your ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ can be traced to the Neolithic or late Stone Age.
But it was kick started by the first farming ‘machinery’ as opposed to the vary from a hunter-gatherer for an agricultural lifestyle, by itself.
The international team’s analysis of data from 150 archaeological sites across Eurasia revealed a steep rise in inequality from around 4,000 BC.
This was about 8,000 years following the creation of farming. They used statistical techniques to compare different types of wealth, societies, regions and times.
Lead author Prof Amy Bogaard, an archaeologist in the University of Oxford, said: “The surprise here isn’t so much inequality takes off afterwards, it is that it stayed low for so very long.”
The finding backs an earlier analysis of 300 human skeletons by British scientists that suggested the idea of inherited wealth began with Neolithic man 7,000 years ago.
Co author Prof Mattia Fochesato, an economist at Bocconi University, Milan, said: “The typical story – the societies that adopted agriculture became more unequal – is not valid because we observed some societies who adopted agriculture were remarkably egalitarian for thousands of years.”
Before around 4,000 BC, people across the Middle East and Europe cultivated a patchwork of small garden plots. They were like present day ‘allotments’ in the united kingdom, said Prof Bogaard.
Families would have grown a range cereal grains in addition to lentils, peas, and other pulse crops that needed to be harvested manually.
Notably, they'd have tilled the soil by hand using hoes, in some instances also with the help of unspecialised cattle such as ageing milk cows to pull ploughs.
They would also need to carefully monitor their gardens during the growing season to protect them from wildlife.
Prof Bogaard said: “It was quite a busy landscape, with a lot of people working in and around these garden plots.”
Then something changed. Those were well resourced enough to boost and maintain specialised plough oxen saw new opportunities in farming additional land.
A single farmer with an ox team could cultivate 10 times or more land than a hoe farmer, and would start to acquire more and much more land growing.
The researchers developed an economic model that reveals a key distinction between farming systems where human labour was the limiting factor for production.
This was compared to systems where it had been more expendable, and where land was the limiting factor.
Prof Fochesato said: “As long as labour was the key input for production, inequality was limited because families did not differ much in how much labor they might deploy to create crops.
“However when the most crucial input became land, differences between families widened because land along with other material forms of wealth might be accumulated and transmitted over generations.
“By chance, or force, or hard work, some families found have a lot more than others. Then radical inequality arose.”
The new information supports research two years ago which identified much greater wealth inequality in post Neolithic Eurasia compared to the Americas – where domesticated animals that could pull heavy loads weren't available.
But probably the most unequal societies were rather more fragile and prone to political upheaval or global warming, said Prof Bogaard.
The takeaway for individuals today is “should there be possibilities to monopolise land or any other key assets in a production system, people will,” she said.
“And when there aren’t institutional or any other redistributive mechanisms, inequality is definitely where we will wind up.”
Land is still of relevant value “but there are many other sorts of assets now that we ought to consider people’s ability to own and take advantage of,” added Prof Bogaard.
