Wealth inequality seems a meaningless measure to apply in retrospect to societies which had no material wealth. Even if these groups were materially egalitarian (i.e. everyone is poor by modern standards), I doubt that there was real equality. The fact that some men would have reproduced with multiple women while others did not reproduce at all is an example of this.
This article follows the tried-and-true format of "Everyone used to think ABSOLUTIST_STRAWMAN_NO_ONE_ACTUALLY_BELIEVES was true, but now we've learned the issue is more nuanced."
I'm not buying this guy's long-winded "debunk." I think the book Sapiens does a better job at discussing the potential theories and the evidence to back it up.
The authors are arguing that findings in anthropology and archeology, if further researched for many more decades, will reveal that it is possible for our modern industrial societies to abolish inequality and become anarchist socialist regimes.<p>It has some interesting facts, but also some essential errors. Rousseau did not say the original state of nature was people living in small bands, but rather entirely independently. Anthropologists have never said that the original foraging bands were independent,but were always parts of tribes. And they have for a long time held that foraging tribes in areas with a high concentration of food resources, such as the American Pacific North-West, were sedentary.<p>Perhaps most important is that foraging tribes, due to population pressures, engage in regular violent conflict over land. With the coming of agriculture such conflict intensifies, and eventually leads to highly inequal militaristic civilizations.
TL;DR: Ancient hunter-gatherer societies, in at least some instances, may have transformed from small bands into larger groups (and then back) through the course of a year. In the process, they could also move from more authoritarian to more egalitarian and back. Therefore everything everybody thinks they know about the origin of authoritarianism and inequality is wrong.<p>But they took 50(!) screens of text to say it, while presenting what should have been said in one-fifth of the words...
> This is important because the narrative also defines our sense of political possibility.<p>The thesis rests on this assumption, but I kind of doubt that people base their political beliefs on how early agricultural societies ordered themselves.
Mostly a lot of establishment bashing because 'they' are dumb and he is not. There are competing theories about the emergence of farming, even if not as fast as often stated it was still a profound revolution.