Science1 publisher2 min readPublished
Review of a century of ethnography finds inequality in every hunter-gatherer society
Anthropologists who study the Hadza and Tsimane pooled more than a century of ethnography and found inequality in every society they examined. The result undercuts the popular image of foragers as living proof that humans start out equal.
The Scientist · Science desk
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What happened
- On a good day a Hadza hunter's family keeps half of a kill, sometimes much less, and almost everyone from miles around is entitled to a share.
- The same Hadza camps reserve certain cuts of meat exclusively for older men and give better hunters more respect.
- Elsewhere, Ju/'Hoansi families controlled hunting land around waterholes, the Bayaka traded and hoarded ritual knowledge, and the Agta arranged marriages in ways that discriminated against orphans.
- Across societies women did more direct parenting and men more community decision-making, while in many Australian societies older men controlled ritual secrets and younger relatives' marriages.
Compiled by The ScientistSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- decision Researchers who treat foragers as an equality baseline now have to name the axis they mean, because flat possessions can coexist with age and gender rules over who decides and who marries whom.
- precedent If self-interest produces equality, models of forager politics can drop the premise that people are generous by nature and build from incentives and the option to leave.
- contradiction The specialists who coined the egalitarian label had already said some foragers are very unequal and that equality takes effort, so the baseline this review hits hardest is the popular one.
The thing this doesn't tell you is how much. The account, written for The Conversation and republished by Phys.org, does not say how many societies the review covered, where it appeared, or how inequality was scored [6][16]. The authors set out "to find out just how egalitarian hunter-gatherer and other subsistence societies really are" [17]. The answer they report is categorical: no society lacked inequality [1]. That leaves no effect size, and no way to rank the Hadza against the Agta, or foragers against farmers. Once gender, age and informal leadership count as axes, nearly any human group will show some inequality [9]. In the authors' words, "inequalities are part of even the most equal of societies" [4].
The claim about cause says more. Hunter-gatherers are frequently generous, the authors write, but the processes limiting inequality often do not require any generosity. Instead, equality often results from "people's self-interested motives to acquire resources, status and autonomy" [10]. The levers they describe in the communities they know fit that account. Leaders are highly constrained in how they can direct others. Decisions are often made by consensus, and when people cannot agree, families move away [11].
The record also has a date range. It runs from the early 20th century onward [1]. Several of the popular claims the authors push against are about the deep past: that past hunter-gatherer societies had no permanent leadership or hierarchy, and that inequality only spread with agriculture [13]. Ethnography of groups observed in the last hundred years or so speaks to those claims only by analogy, and that is true whichever side cites it.
The authors do not end up at the opposite pole. They credit the communities they work with for limiting many inequalities, and note that most families have similar, modest possessions and store little material wealth [11]. The truth lies "probably somewhere in between," they wrote [15]. On the other side are the critics of the egalitarian picture. "The Dawn of Everything" calls egalitarianism a "Garden of Eden narrative" that lacks substance, and other scholars have called egalitarian societies a scientific origin myth [14].
What to watch
- The full review's count of societies and its coding scheme; with those, inequality could be compared in degree across groups.
- Quantitative data from the authors' Hadza and Tsimane fieldwork that puts a size on status or resource gaps.
- Replies from scholars who defend the egalitarian characterization, particularly on whether age and gender differences belong in the same category as control of property.