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Inequality, it turns out, is not a natural outcome of agriculture or societal progress but it is a consequence of deliberate choices by those in power.
The GINI study challenged the belief that inequality began with agriculture. (AI Image for representation)
The age-old narrative that inequality is a natural, eternal condition of human society is being upended by a groundbreaking archaeological study spanning 10,000 years and over 1,000 ancient settlements. Contrary to the widespread belief that humans have always lived under a system of wealth and power disparity, new research revealed that equality was not only possible in ancient times – it was real in many places, until power intervened to break it.
Conducted under the ambitious global project The Global Dynamics of Inequality (GINI), archaeologists examined more than 50,000 ancient homes across civilisations in the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Mesoamerica. The results are reshaping how we understand the evolution of inequality. Using the size and structure of dwellings as proxies for wealth – larger houses indicating affluence, smaller ones representing poverty – researchers calculated inequality levels using the GINI coefficient, a metric where 0 represents perfect equality and 1 represents maximum inequality.
What they discovered was startling. Some ancient societies exhibited far lower inequality than even modern welfare states. While the United States today scores 0.41 and Norway 0.27, several prehistoric communities registered significantly lower levels, suggesting a conscious and collective effort to maintain egalitarian systems.
Inequality, it turns out, is not a natural outcome of agriculture or societal progress but it is a consequence of deliberate choices by those in power.
In many early societies, researchers found mechanisms that actively suppressed the concentration of wealth. In ancient Athens, the wealthy were compelled to fund public festivals and infrastructure. In other civilisations, inheritances were redistributed among the poor, and debt forgiveness was enacted to prevent the rise of slavery. These were not accidental occurrences but they were societal decisions shaped by the values of the ruling systems.
The study directly challenges the deeply entrenched belief that inequality began with the advent of agriculture. While it’s often claimed that farming led to the accumulation of surplus and, eventually, the emergence of elites, researchers found that some agrarian societies remained strikingly equal, while certain hunter-gatherer communities already showed signs of hierarchy. The determining factor was not food production, but power – who wielded it, how it was legitimised, and whether it was used to benefit the many or the few.
At its core, the GINI study strikes at the heart of fatalistic ideologies that perpetuate inequality. Phrases like “poverty is destiny” or “the system can’t be changed” are, the research suggests, not truths but tools crafted and promoted by those in power to discourage reform and suppress dissent.
