How did we get here? on Nostr: Appendix 5: More discoveries challenging conventional ideas about human cultural ...

Appendix 5: More discoveries challenging conventional ideas about human cultural evolution

A groundbreaking study published in the journal PNAS is overturning traditional wisdom regarding the origins and inevitability of wealth inequality. Based on a massive dataset of over 50,000 houses in some 1,000 archaeological sites worldwide, the study suggests that economic inequality is not an inevitable result of societal advancement, agriculture, or population. Instead, it seems to be a consequence of political choices and governance structures.
https://archaeologymag.com/2025/04/study-reveals-inequality-was-never-inevitable/

State formation across cultures and the role of grain, intensive agriculture, taxation and writing
This research adds weight to the conclusion of James C. Scott (author of AGAINST THE GRAIN and SEEING LIKE A STATE) that state was not a welcomed, voluntary evolution made inevitable by the emergence of agriculture, as predominant narratives would have us believe, rather it was intensive agriculture and monoculture coercively *imposed* on people by the ruling elite of a specific sort of newly emergent system of domination and exploitation.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-025-02365-5

Essay by David Wengrow: Beyond Kingdoms and Empires
A revolution in archaeology is transforming our picture of past populations and the scope of human freedoms
https://aeon.co/essays/an-archeological-revolution-transforms-our-image-of-human-freedoms

HeavenlyPossum (npub1s02…zz9t) thread on the spread of agriculture and the rise of the state:
https://kolektiva.social/@HeavenlyPossum/112864320248967445

HeavenlyPossum (npub1s02…zz9t) thread on humans' relationship with "wilderness":
https://kolektiva.social/@HeavenlyPossum/112785679516359170

Unearthing Power: Female Leadership and Building a Monumental Society at Copper Age Valencina
“This society expressed leadership not through brute domination but through spiritual, symbolic, and material capital,” the authors write.
"Despite its sophistication, Valencina never evolved into a state. Instead, it represented a unique form of early social complexity—one shaped not by kings or dynasties, but by collaborative labor, ritualized consumption, and female-centered authority. The political economy of Valencina, the study notes, offers critical insight into “top-down impulses vs. collective action” and invites new perspectives on how societies organized themselves in the absence of centralized state control."
https://wildhunt.org/2025/05/unearthing-power-female-leadership-and-building-a-monumental-society-at-copper-age-valencina.html

How ghost cities in the Amazon are rewriting the story of civilization
Remote sensing, including lidar, reveals that the Amazon was once home to millions of people. The emerging picture of how they lived challenges ideas of human cultural evolution (archived from NewScientist)
https://archive.ph/vcsip

HeavenlyPossum (npub1s02…zz9t) thread: The City Without the State—complex urban infrastructure at the Pingliantai Neolithic site
https://kolektiva.social/@HeavenlyPossum/111079324770420934

HeavenlyPossum (npub1s02…zz9t) thread: The City Without the State—political revolution and social leveling at the Taosi Neolithic site
https://kolektiva.social/@HeavenlyPossum/111098000190597587

Exploring the ways in which residents of Neolithic Çatalhöyük in Anatolia differentiated themselves as well as the ways in which they did not:
"Scholars have long debated whether early agropastoralism was intrinsically associated with the “origins of inequality,” seeking the roots of current cultural practices or problems and largely presenting social developments as the byproducts of sedentism and/or crop agriculture. Many now reject any inherent linkage between agriculture and inequality as teleological and materialist, and there is no longer a consensus that either sedentism or food production automatically entails the rise of inequality greater than exists in hunting and gathering societies."

"Our results [exploring the ways in which residents of Neolithic Çatalhöyük in Anatolia differentiated themselves as well as the ways in which they did not] indicate no unified trajectory of inequality through time... and no evidence for institutionalized or lasting economic or social inequality."

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0307067

"Çatalhöyük has strong evidence of an egalitarian society, as no houses with distinctive features (belonging to royalty or religious hierarchy for example) have been found so far. The most recent investigations also reveal little social distinction based on gender, with men and women receiving equivalent nutrition and seeming to have equal social status, as typically found in Paleolithic cultures."

"Noting the lack of hierarchy and economic inequality, historian and anti-capitalist author Murray Bookchin has argued that Çatalhöyük was an early example of anarcho-communism."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%87atalh%C3%B6y%C3%BCk