The Rational Optimist_ How Prosperity Evolves - Matt Ridley [63]
They also got a bad attack of inequality for the first time. Extant hunter-gatherers are remarkably egalitarian, a state of affairs dictated by their dependence on sharing each other’s hunting and gathering luck. (They sometimes need to enforce this equality with savage reprisals against people who get ideas above their stations.) A successful farmer, however, can soon afford to store some provisions with which to buy the labour of other less successful neighbours, and that makes him more successful still, until eventually – especially in an irrigated river valley, where he controls the water – he can become an emperor using servants and soldiers to impose his despotic whim upon subjects.
Worse still, as Friedrich Engels was the first to argue, agriculture may have worsened sexual inequality. It is certainly painfully obvious that in many peasant farming communities, men make women do much of the hard work. In hunter-gathering, men have many tiresome sexist habits, but they do at least contribute. When the plough was invented around 6,000 years ago, men took over the work of driving the oxen that cultivated fields, because it required greater strength, but this only exacerbated inequality. Now women were treated increasingly as the chattels of men, loaded with bracelets and ankle rings to indicate their husband’s wealth. Now art became dominated by the symbols of male power and competition – arrows, axes and daggers. Now polygamy probably increased and the wealthiest men acquired harems and patriarchal status: at Branc in Slovakia, more women than men were buried with elaborate grave goods, indicating not that they were wealthy, so much as that their polygamous husbands were wealthy while other men languished in celibate poverty. In this way, polygamy enables poor women to share in prosperity more than poor men. It was an age of patriarchy.
Yet there is no evidence that early farmers behaved any worse than hunter-gatherers. Those few hunter-gatherer societies that became fat and prosperous on a dependable and rich local resource – most notably, the salmon-fishing tribes of the American north-west – soon indulged in patriarchy and inequality, too. The ‘original affluence’ of the modern hunter-gatherer !Kung was only possible because of modern tools, trade with farmers and even the odd helping hand from anthropologists. Their low fertility owed more to sexually transmitted infections than birth control. As for the deformities of early farmers, skeletons may not be representative and may tell you more about the injuries and diseases that were survived, rather than proved fatal. Even the gender equality of hunter-gatherers may prove wishful thinking. After all, Fuegian men, who could not swim, left their wives to anchor canoes in kelp beds and swim ashore in snow storms. The truth is that both hunter-gathering and farming could produce affluence or misery depending on the abundance of food and the relative density of people. One commentator writes: ‘All pre-industrial economies, no matter how simple or complex, are capable of generating misery and will do so given enough time.’
The chronic and perpetual violence of the hunter-gatherer world had not ended with the invention of farming. Oetzi died a violent death, shot from behind by an arrow that pierced an artery in his shoulder, after – so DNA suggests – killing two men with one of his own arrows and carrying a wounded comrade on his back. The blood of a fourth man was on his knife. In the process he sustained a deep cut to his thumb and a fatal blow to the head. This was no small skirmish. His position in death suggests that his killer turned him over to retrieve the arrow, but the stone arrow head broke off inside his body. The archaeologist Steven LeBlanc says that the evidence of constant violence in the ancient past has been systematically overlooked by Rousseauesque wishful thinking