Legacy Issues
100 generations of wealth equality after the Neolithic transitions
Tim Kerig et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 22 April 2025
Abstract:
From Rousseau onward, scholars have identified the transition to sedentary agriculture as crucial to the history of wealth inequality. Here, using the GINI project's global database on disparities in residential size, we examine the effects of important innovations in plant cultivation, animal husbandry, and traction on wealth inequality. Over a series of regional case studies, we find no evidence of major changes in residential disparity before or after these technological innovations became widespread, and where the effects of systemic change are recognizable, they are ambiguous. The introduction of horticulture/farming is accompanied by a slight general increase in inequality, while subsequent innovations tend to have a leveling effect. Although increasing productivity and surplus are critical to generating wealth inequality, nothing in our data suggests that rising productivity alone led to greater wealth inequality.
Unique osteological evidence for human-animal gladiatorial combat in Roman Britain
Tim Thompson et al.
PLoS ONE, April 2025
Abstract:
The spectacle of Roman gladiatorial combat captures the public imagination and elicits significant scholarly interest. Skeletal evidence associated with gladiatorial combat is rare, with most evidence deriving from written or visual sources. A single skeleton from a Roman cemetery outside of York where gladiators arguably were buried presented with unusual lesions. Investigation, including comparative work from modern zoological institutions, has demonstrated that these marks originate from large cat scavenging. Thus, we present the first physical evidence for human-animal gladiatorial combat from the Roman period seen anywhere in Europe.
War both reduced and increased inequality over the past ten thousand years
Mark McCoy et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 22 April 2025
Abstract:
Scholars are divided over the long-term effects that war has had on inequality. Some have argued that conflict grows the gap between rich and poor. Others counter that violence levels out wealth differences. The GINI Project Database is a large global sample of archaeological data on house sizes created to investigate what factors influenced economic inequality over long periods of time, including warfare. Over 39,000 individual residential units were coded as having fortifications present or absent, with about a third in fortified settlements (n = 13,372) and two-thirds in unfortified settlements (n = 25,897). We compared residential disparity (differences in residential unit sizes within a settlement) at sites around the world (n = 770) dating as far back as 10,000 y ago. We found strong support for the expectation that conflict was linked with increasing residential disparity (i.e., wealth inequality), specifically when governance was less collective and the main factor limiting agricultural production was available land. However, we also found long periods, especially in the earliest eras represented in the database, when fortified settlements had residential disparity less than or equal to unfortified settlements. These early societies tended to be more collective with available labor limiting agricultural production. We speculate that in these communities, the relative value of coalition building was higher, whereas in cases where conflict was associated with rising residential disparity, elites found a way to leverage their wealth to protect property. These contradictory models help explain why war co-occurs with increasing inequality in some cases and decreasing inequality in others.
Punic people were genetically diverse with almost no Levantine ancestors
Harald Ringbauer et al.
Nature, forthcoming
Abstract:
The maritime Phoenician civilization from the Levant transformed the entire Mediterranean during the first millennium BCE. However, the extent of human movement between the Levantine Phoenician homeland and Phoenician-Punic settlements in the central and western Mediterranean has been unclear in the absence of comprehensive ancient DNA studies. Here, we generated genome-wide data for 210 individuals, including 196 from 14 sites traditionally identified as Phoenician and Punic in the Levant, North Africa, Iberia, Sicily, Sardinia and Ibiza, and an early Iron Age individual from Algeria. Levantine Phoenicians made little genetic contribution to Punic settlements in the central and western Mediterranean between the sixth and second centuries BCE, despite abundant archaeological evidence of cultural, historical, linguistic and religious links. Instead, these inheritors of Levantine Phoenician culture derived most of their ancestry from a genetic profile similar to that of Sicily and the Aegean. Much of the remaining ancestry originated from North Africa, reflecting the growing influence of Carthage. However, this was a minority contributor of ancestry in all of the sampled sites, including in Carthage itself. Different Punic sites across the central and western Mediterranean show similar patterns of high genetic diversity. We also detect genetic relationships across the Mediterranean, reflecting shared demographic processes that shaped the Punic world.
Economic inequality is fueled by population scale, land-limited production, and settlement hierarchies across the archaeological record
Timothy Kohler et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 22 April 2025
Abstract:
Defining wealth broadly to include wealth in people, relational connections, and material possessions, we examine the prehistory of wealth inequality at the level of the residential units using the consistent proxy of Gini coefficients calculated across areas of contemporaneous residential units. In a sample of >1,100 sites and > 47,000 residential units spanning >10,000 y, persistent wealth inequality typically lags the onset of plant cultivation by more than a millennium. It accompanies landscape modifications and subsistence practices in which land (rather than labor) limits production, and growth of hierarchies of settlement size. Gini coefficients are markedly higher through time in settlements at or near the top of such hierarchies; settlements not enmeshed in these systems remain relatively egalitarian even long after plant and animal domestication. We infer that some households in top-ranked settlements were able to exploit the network effects, agglomeration opportunities, and (eventually) political leverage provided by these hierarchies more effectively than others, likely boosted by efficient intergenerational transmission of material resources after increased sedentism made that more common. Since population growth is associated with increased sedentism, more land-limited production, and the appearance and growth of settlement hierarchies, it is deeply implicated in the postdomestication rise of wealth inequality. Governance practices mediate the degree of wealth inequality, as do technical innovations such as the use of animals for portage, horseback riding, and the development of iron smelting.