James Suzman
anthropologist
James Suzman (born 1970) is an anthropologist and the author from the Cambridge, United Kingdom.
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QuotesEdit
- Most people regard hierarchy in human societies as inevitable, a natural part of who we are. Yet this belief contradicts much of the 200,000-year history of Homo sapiens.
In fact, our ancestors have for the most part been “fiercely egalitarian”, intolerant of any form of inequality. While hunter-gatherers accepted that people had different skills, abilities and attributes, they aggressively rejected efforts to institutionalise them into any form of hierarchy.
So what happened to cause such a profound shift in the human psyche away from egalitarianism? The balance of archaeological, anthropological and genomic data suggests the answer lies in the agricultural revolution, which began roughly 10,000 years ago.- How Neolithic farming sowed the seeds of modern inequality 10,000 years ago, The Guardian, (5 December, 2017).
