But it doesn't change the fact that it was first discovered in Cucuteni.
(Wikipedia elides the ~5-10 year gap between publication of Cucuteni and publication of Trypillia... very possible the latter discovery was just Ukranian Vincenc Chvojka trying to "get in on the action" after hearing about Cucuteni.)
Given the "social strata" ideas presented in the article, I have bias concern alarms going off.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burned_house_horizon
(edited: grammar)
What do you mean by key social concerns? Are you suggesting House Burning was a form of intracommunal violence? The linked article doesn't support that.
The only value of tying the two things together would be saying "We don't and maybe can't actually know anything about these people," which is useless. Instead they took a focused approach to using a known tool, the Gini coefficient, to make some specific guesses.
Jumping to "household income" seems too much for me, given nothing more than house size.
Example (from the article): "In addition, poorer households are prone to lose members to richer households, have lower life expectancy and higher infant mortality rates..."
This is certainly a more modern perspective and not something I'd associate with a pastoral community like this.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I view such articles with a huge amount of skepticism.
> Based on the results of extensive excavations and geophysical surveys, this article calculates Gini coefficients—a statistical measure of inequality in the distribution of household income—of house floor sizes, which have been shown to be a suitable proxy for evaluating household variability in diverse cultural contexts and in global comparative studies (e.g. Kohler et al. Reference Kohler2017; Thompson et al. Reference Thompson, Feinman and Prufer2021; Basri & Lawrence Reference Basri and Lawrence2020).
Otherwise it seems like you're pushing your own preferred interpretation onto data you don't understand.
I don't agree that the authors went out of their way to characterize the ruins through a lens of our modern society. If they did, they've hidden that from me.
Basically, I see it most men and women had a bad deal in choosing their mate in inegalitarian villages, some temporary festivals were held where an example of more fairness being possible was shown and then these mega-sites merged festivals and village in a location that now had hundreds of potential matches for everyone.
When you have no material wealth (as a status indicator) that can be passed on that divides people by birth and no formal power system, then the status will be the deeds of the people. And people are not that different on average.
Inbreeding would be rather a strong motivation to get fresh blood and have regular festivals to achieve that. But trading, and general coordination and communication to fight of bigger threats were likely a strong motivator as well.
- these "megasites" were bigger and more urban than your typical Neolithic village, and certainly than a typical group of nomads or hunter-gatherers.
- normally, increased urbanisation like that would lead to increased levels of inequality, for the reasons you mention (you can acquire more material wealth through specialisation, and it's easier to accumulate it when you don't have to carry it with you)
- but actually, from their analysis of floor plan sizes, there wasn't as much inequality as we might expect.
It seems a little tenuous to me. I'd like to see their conclusions when you add on the error bars for "just how strongly family wealth correlates to house size", "how accurate is our distribution of house sizes given we only recovered X% of them" and all the other assumptions being made along the way.
Bill gates has what 1 million times more wealth than the average person his age, more? There’s no way someone in a Neolithic village could get that kind of advantage over the average person in a neolithic village. Someone having 10x the productivity/wealth/etc sure, but 10,000x just isn’t on the table at least as considered by the time period. We place extreme value on gold where a shiny stone might be worth thousands of tons of food, but nobody back then would make such an exchange.
Extreme wealth takes social structures to support it. People 2,000 years ago had less wealth than today on average but you could still have some guy with more concubines in their haram than existed in a Neolithic village.
I pay taxes that build roads and schools which enable commercial tycoons like Bill Gates to reap enormous profits. Bill Gates buys farm land, which drives up prices and blocks me from accessing that land.
Bill Gates pays a lot more taxes than you do, and contributes greatly more to those same roads and schools.
You were blocked from accessing that farmland before Bill Gates bought it, and regardless of who bought it, you would still be blocked from accessing it.
There is plenty of farmland for sale in the US, if you were considering buying it yourself.
Before a Microsoft employee drives on public roads someone needs to have paid to create and maintain those roads. Without government spending creating an environment conducive to wealth creation you don’t end up with billionaire business men you get warlords and poor people.
That is one, not universally-accepted, perspective, I guess.
Given it's est. he'd have paid $500m+ in income tax in 2023[1], I think your calculation is off — he's subsidizing your economic activity.
Just because the rate is lower, doesn't mean the real $ amount — what actually matters — isn't vastly higher.
—
[1]: https://ca.news.yahoo.com/much-bill-gates-pays-property-1910...
You may agree or disagree with with what his foundation is doing, but your subsidizing it anyway.
It's a non-profit foundation that's main function is giving the money away, funding social and educational development in developing countries, and solving huge international human rights issues. One of the biggest in the world, too.
Why do you think people get tax-deductions from donations? Your priority here seems to be more to find any reason to slam someone who is wealthy, rather than actually for the better of society.
Some things you might agree with but money is fungible. I’d rather pay for someone’s healthcare than subsidize his multi million dollar yacht etc.
PS: If you really believe in what the gates foundation is doing you can give them more money to work with here ( https://www.gatesphilanthropypartners.org/) but you can’t give them less.
By all methods of accounting, Bill Gates contributes more to the public coffers than any other human being under discussion.
Your definition of "subsidize" is predicated on the belief that the state is entitled to a flat percentage of income.
This is arguably preferable (though it is, historically, a very messy argument!), but more importantly it is not true according any existing legal structure.
So you could equally reasonably argue that Bill Gates (or anyone, really) has any number of other responsibilities to the public that you might dream up. He does not.
Exactly zero of your tax pennies went toward the purchase of Bill Gates' yacht. Money is fungible, but that does not mean that all money is in all places at once.
As a simple practical matter, 99% of both his earnings and mine are dependent upon past government spending not just roads but even stuff like the judicial system.But asking everyone pay the same amount while it would benefit us both doesn’t work because the total is larger than some people’s income and we really want government services. Further, it’s not just that he received a larger benefit it also cost more to provide him services.
So if we’re stuck subsidizing some people based on a percentage of our earnings, it’s only reasonable to base the subsidy calculation on a percentage of total earnings.
As to pennies argument, if he bought a lunch it’s meaningless to talk about individual subsidies unless someone paid a truly astronomical amount in taxes it’s some meaningless fraction of a cent. But when you’re talking about ultra large purchases and the lifetime subsidies are both a significant portion of his lifetime earnings and a surprisingly large fraction of federal budget, it cross the penny threshold for some people.
I don't think it's Bill's fault, or even that he benefits from it in any meaningful way. And I don't think that you and I are the victims.
I think we need to be more clear about this. It's not that Bill's (marginal) tax rate is lower than ours. It's that Bill has more and different types of income than we do.
Bill has the types of income that are net beneficial to encourage -- which we do by reducing tax liability on it.
But I think it's more correct to say that Bill contributes more to our lifestyles than we do to his. And that we want Bill to contribute more still.
Not because we need more tax revenue (we don't really), or because of a lifeless theory about non-progressive taxation being more proper (it's so much more complicated than that).
But simply because we're all of a society, and that society is unhealthy when wealth is concentrated too densely.
It's not about fair share. It's about limiting inequality. That's the end goal, so let's address it directly. A flat tax does not do that.
People like Bill Gates should be heroes, for contributing progressively more to society with every success they achieve. (Aside: That was painful to write. Bill himself will always be an evil monopolist who held computing back by 20 years and taught people to believe that computers are scary and unreliable)
But where does that new tax revenue go? Into the maw of the US government, where it is used for important things, often very inefficiently.
Bill & Warren & Charlie (RIP) think they can do it better. And they might be right, honestly. They're creating an super-national voluntary self-taxation regime, and a corresponding appropriations framework to go along with it, out of the gross excess of their inadequately-taxed earnings.
I think that's more than either of us are doing. Even if their projects fail, they will not be obviously less-effective than the same funds as additional tax revenue. :)
The indirect impact is even more profound, consider all the propaganda pushed by billionaires buying media etc.
Now consider an average middle class American, who might afford Swift tickets, could have on the order of a million dollars net worth (albeit mostly illiquid, tied up in their property). That puts them two orders of magnitude off of Taylor Swift, the sort of person they might see a few times in their life. But it puts them six orders of magnitude above somebody who's flat broke on rock bottom, and they certainly meet that sort of person a lot more than they meet Taylor Swift. The inequality gap between a middle class person and somebody at rock bottom is wider much wider and more pervasive in society than the gap between a common middle class "millionaire" and the billionaires, but all nearly all the internet whining about inequality is focused on the billionaires.
Now I grant you, comparing different amounts of zeros is kind of a silly way to think about inequality. Let's get a bit more real: the middle class and billionaires both take a lot for granted that somebody at rock bottom cannot. They both know where they're going to sleep tonight, both feel secure in the knowledge that they're going to have a roof over their heads, stomachs filled with food, medical needs met, etc. Somebody living on the streets has none of that, and that difference is I think far more profound than the difference between the middle class and billionaires. The middle class have to go to work and don't own megayachts or helicopters, but these are trivial matters that needn't worry them so much as somebody living on the street has to worry.
Now what about Neolithic times? I think people at rock bottom still existed back then. People who were cast out from their group, due to disease or getting on the losing side of a power struggle, being a weirdo, or whatever the reason. There were probably people who got banished and probably died soon after. And I think there were probably people who were very popular, who were respected and loved by others, or maybe were feared. People who benefited from a strong social safety net, who got given food by others and were protected by others. The inequality gap between them and the banished would have been immense, just as the inequality gap between the homeless and middle class today is immense. If my assumptions about neolithic society are accurate, then it's absurd to say that neolithic society didn't have meaningful inequality because they didn't have billionaires.
You can be poor in America and still have access to healthcare, food, housing, etc. Almost everything that you think of as middle class kicks in at really low income levels and net negative assets due to government assistance. As in what people own is worth less than their debt.
Meanwhile someone exclude from their community in Neolithic times could have several days worth of food after killing a deer. They had less long term safety, but in terms of material wealth or income the difference wouldn’t be that huge.
A single common person has next to zero chance of impacting any public policy.
My man, it's time to lay off the dating apps ;)
For this matter, what's the point in having a huge village? I can only see protection against warfare and forcing fairness in social interactions and on the matchmaking market. Other things seem to get worse, since increased density makes extracting food from your environment harder.
Adult humans have three basic goals: food, shelter, reproduction. They spend most of their energy on these, and any explanation of a society that ignores one of these has to be incomplete. Maybe the fact that we've moved one of these from the social plane onto the virtual makes that harder to see. I've been off the dating apps for some years by the way. :)
Division of labour/economies of scale are fundamental to human quality of life improvements. Even without much technology/industry, there's still a lot to gain from division of labour.
I find interesting that astrology is based on the rising of the sun in position of the planets which is distinct from a lunar calendar.
What sort of cultural shift would that change create?
You might have a circular argument there.
Archaeology team discovers a 7k-year-old settlement in Serbia - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40220691
All those are obviously connected and related
Also plays nicely into a pet theory of mine, that “social engineering” typically has very different short term and long term effects. It seems in the short term you can change social roles radically by changing rewards and punishment (e.g. communist revolutions). But then people’s personalities start adjusting to the new environment. After 2-3 generations you have radically different personality structures and behaviors in the population.
Sadly politics is about the immediate results, and does not even attribute the long term consequences to the policies introduced 2-3 generations ago.
> Sadly politics is about the immediate results, and does not even attribute the long term consequences to the policies introduced 2-3 generations ago.
Our modern political systems at the current scale have been around for only a few short hundred years. Time will tell how they work out, but I doubt they will be eternal.
Or early adaptation of culture to nature.
I bet those "mega houses" were just for slaves!
I’m sure individuals had preferred roles. I think in this day and age describing them as labor may be more accurate than slave.
> The use of house size as a proxy for the economic status and social power of households in a society is based on broad cross-cultural evidence from ethno-archaeological studies and archival sources as it has been found that household wealth and house size are correlated in many societies
Basic premise of this study is wrong, based on recorded history from the same region. Nomadic herding warriors do not live in houses, and do not leave the same mark in archaeology records.
Early agriculture can support a huge number of people, but they will be malnourished, and always be dominated by meat fed elites!
Your nomadic herding warriors leave graves behind - Kurgan - as well as distinctive pottery, as clues to the general area they were being nomadic in, which was initially elsewhere while the Cucuteni were thriving. I don't think maintaining slaves at a distance works as a concept.
Also it is likely that the notion of "elites" is different in our age than in the era before the invention of money. Our elites are not elites of mind, soul, or even body. They are sitting on their hordes of extracted wealth. Earlier any sort of elites in an agrarian society (which presumably precludes strongmen type of "elite") would likely be based on group psychology and charismatic power (shaman, priests, divine representative, etc.)
Not really. Look at "pax Romana" or Aztecs. Warlords bring peace!
If villages are part of the same empire, they are at peace. Without central force there is constant local bickering and fight. Warlords take their tributes (including soldiers) and wage war far away. Or they punish population by killing one man in family. There is no need to burn entire village, it hurts profit.
People at that time were able to build huge megalithic structures. It is safe to assume they could organise small army of a few thousands (enough to dominate 20k settlements).
Or not.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burned_house_horizon
There's sparse evidence for exposure to archaeological literature.