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
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