Let’s return to those rich Upper Palaeolithic burials, so often interpreted as evidence for the emergence of ‘inequality’, or even hereditary nobility of some sort. For some odd reason, those who make such arguments never seem to notice – or, if they do, to attach much significance to the fact – that a quite remarkable number of these skeletons (indeed, a majority) bear evidence of striking physical anomalies that could only have marked them out, clearly and dramatically, from their social surroundings.36 The adolescent boys in both Sunghir and Dolní Věstonice, for instance, had pronounced
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