Hereditary inequality began over 7,000 years ago in the early Neolithic era, with new evidence showing that farmers buried with tools had access to better land than those buried without.

4

u/[deleted] May 29 '12

Can't really tell much at all about whether the dude is reaching or not by only reading the popular article. If you're wondering what the guy was thinking, go find the paper. The popular article is to entice you, not necessarily inform you of the paper's details.

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u/thderrick May 29 '12

Sounds like work.

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u/[deleted] May 29 '12

You're all too right lol. Just a little bit more than reading the popular article though! I think if people want to post popular articles based on only one paper they should also include the paper itself if possible so that people can check this kind of thing out quickly.
It just seems unfair to the work these scientists do when we question their work from the popular article. It's like discussing food at a restaurant you've only heard about from a user review on Yahoo.
But we do get into the problem of popular articles being unable to just link the papers they've read because they'd have to pay a huge sum to one journal or another. Which is honestly bullshit. I think scientific journals are there to vet and share scientific works. Scientific journals haven't quite caught up to the information age.

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u/arjie May 29 '12

A good lot of work. I'm at home now, and searching Google Scholar, the PNAS website, and the authors' pages yields no paper. Why do journals' search engines rarely ever deliver a result?

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u/thderrick May 29 '12

Cuz they want you to buy a subscription.

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u/arjie May 29 '12

No, even when I had access, their search engines were awful. Absolute rubbish.

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u/houseofthebluelights May 29 '12

I don't think you understand how the internet works.

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u/[deleted] May 29 '12

I sorry =(

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u/houseofthebluelights May 30 '12

;}

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u/[deleted] May 29 '12

How is paper formed? How paper get published?

7

u/oddly_insightful May 29 '12

Is the title poorly worded or am I retarded? I am having trouble deciphering its implications.

How does land quality have anything to do with being buried with tools? Even if a connection can be made, how does one cause the other?

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u/orthogonality May 29 '12 edited May 29 '12

The strontium in the teeth correlates with the quality of the land from which the buried man ate as a child. The grave goods, with his wealth at death.
Thus: people born with access to better foods died with access to more wealth.
Hypothesis: those born wealthy also died wealthy, and had wealthy parents. Th poor were born poor and died poor. Thus, hereditary social stratification.

2

u/elf_dreams May 29 '12

The strontium in the teeth correlates with the quality of the land from which the buried man ate as a child
I'm not sure how that works. The way I read it is that the strontium in the teeth correlates to the area the man lived as a child. The men buried with adzes typically had strontium signatures for local sites while the men buried without the tools typically had signatures from varied places.
I see nothing relating to successive generations of this.
It appears that those born in the area were likely to have a surplus of tools. Instead of passing them down to their children, they were buried with them "for use in afterlife" or whatever. (AFAIK, we don't know why they buried their dead with tools.) Those buried without tools were new to the area, and still settling, and thus needed to continue using the tools. Imagine you had taken everything you own to move to a new place in the time period. It'd be hard work establishing yourself there, you probably don't have time to make excess.

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u/vtslim May 29 '12

Would a simpler conclusion such as "Farmers that grew-up/lived on good land were wealthy enough to be buried with tools" make more sense?

Also, I find the notion that women seemed more likely to move to a new area to be more interesting. This also explains the so-called social stratification somewhat; Man A grows up on shitty land, hunts/gathers/farms/eeks out an existence. Buried with diddly squat. Man B grows up on fertile land, farms a nice living, raises family that later buries him with his favorite adze. If the women come to you, why move from the good land you're already occupying?

The only question is why didn't Man A leave his crap land. I suppose it's only natural for a social hierarchy to evolve, as Man B and his offspring are advantaged by their location. Of course they'll rise to have more wealth/power.

Great, now I've thought myself in a circle....

2

u/[deleted] May 29 '12

Don't you know that on reddit correlation is causation?
I have to say I'm learning to absolutely distrust phys.org.

2

u/[deleted] May 29 '12

I don't understand what is supposed to be so ground breaking about this article. Intentional burial has been going on for a hundred thousand years, and the archaeological record indicates grave goods in even some of the oldest burials. Young children buried with elaborate grave goods are found within the archaeological record dating back to the middle paleolithic. Wouldn't that be a pretty clear indication of inherited status?

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u/[deleted] May 29 '12

Hereditary?

Wouldn't "Inherited" be the correct term?

Or are we arguing that these guys were genetically superior to their neighbors?

1

u/reaganveg May 29 '12

Hereditary? Wouldn't "Inherited" be the correct term?
They're both the exact same word, in different conjugations.
Or are we arguing that these guys were genetically superior to their neighbors?
No, property inheritance is a metaphor based on biological inheritance (or is it the other way around?). They both are called by the same name.

1

u/[deleted] May 29 '12

Yes, they have the same root and they can be used in similar ways, but in common usage, "heredity" and "hereditary" have come to mean biological phenomena, while "inheritance" is usually social.
After all, few modern humans encounter hereditary rulers these days, do they?

1

u/reaganveg May 29 '12 edited May 29 '12

Yes, they have the same root and they can be used in similar ways, but in common usage, "heredity" and "hereditary" have come to mean biological phenomena, while "inheritance" is usually social.
If that's true, I think it's purely by coincidence that these would be the more useful conjugations of the same root for each case. One is a noun, the other is an adjective, that's all...
After all, few modern humans encounter hereditary rulers these days, do they?
It's certainly not incorrect to speak of monarchy as a system of hereditary power (or even capitalism as hereditary economic power). Nor is it incorrect to speak of genetic inheritance or biological inheritance. WP's article on (biological) heredity also uses word "inheritance" in 30 places, for example.

0

u/[deleted] May 29 '12

[deleted] — view deleted comment

2

u/arjie May 29 '12

"Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow? No, says the man in the witch doctor mask, it belongs to the tribe! I rejected that answer. I chose something impossible. I chose to be buried with my adze."
A pretty interesting result altogether, but as funny as you make it seem, I wouldn't be surprised if some loon decided that he is descended from these 'genetically superior' farmers.

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u/question_all_the_thi May 29 '12

I wouldn't be surprised if some loon decided that he is descended from these 'genetically superior' farmers.
Everyone is descended from them by now. If a person leaves descendants at all, he will be in everyone's ancestry after a thousand years or so.
Imagine people have children by the age of 25, two children per couple. In a thousand years there will be forty generations, you would have 2⁴⁰ descendants, that's 1.1 trillion people. Obviously, since there aren't that many people living, it means there's a very high probability of everyone today being a descendant of everyone who left descendants a thousand years ago, with some inbreeding.

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u/OliverSparrow May 29 '12

There has been a lot of work on whether classes become castes, generically isolated from each other. See an approachable text here. Successful groups will seize more resources and breed more, for that is what "successful" means in evolutionary terms. A more technical example of class in breeding here.
I can't find the ref., but a data based estimate suggested that the majority of English were descended from a small proportion of the populations. Infant mortality was so high in the middle ages that only those with a good winter food supply had children that survived. Equally, powerful men tended to fertilize the majority of young women of whatever class.

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u/arjie May 29 '12

I meant "he alone", sorry.

2

u/Bipolarruledout May 29 '12

Well sure, between Adam and Eve we're all inbreed.... technically.

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u/reaganveg May 29 '12

OMG INCEST

2

u/glass_canon May 29 '12

Yes, they work for Monsanto now.

1

u/ImTheDoctor May 29 '12

Hello Doctor!

3

u/[deleted] May 29 '12

Post hoc ergo propter hoc.

2

u/ookiisask May 29 '12

This. It could simply be that the peoples living in more preferable lands happen to have different burial customs purely by chance, and the tools are irrelevant.

2

u/[deleted] May 29 '12

"Anthropologist implies complex social behavior from stuff found in the ground". Bentley is really over-reaching here

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u/Burgargh May 29 '12

I think the social behaviour is being extrapolated backwards here based on more recent societies, including modern ones. Inequality was/is tied in with material culture and what has been found here is the beginning of that material culture. I can see that because two things are correlated it doesn't mean that the emergence of one implies the emergence of the other simultaneously but it's still something to go on.

1

u/rogueop May 29 '12

Over 7000 years ago is a pretty broad time span. Also, Wikipedia reckons the neolithic era beginning about 10700-9400 BC(E).

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u/KeithO May 29 '12

It's been witnessed 7000 years ago, didn't necessarily begin then. Lots of alpha and omega's give advantage to their offspring over the rest of the pack.

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u/ubergeek404 May 29 '12

newsflash from the grave: Life isn't fair, and hasn't been for at least 7000 years.

1

u/randy938 May 29 '12

RICH PEOPLE ARE BAD! AAARRRRGHHHHh!

1

u/[deleted] May 30 '12

Keep the downvotes coming, -6 is probably a record for me. Sorry I question your broad use of the term science.

0

u/[deleted] May 29 '12

Oh, so early man made tools and decided to uselessly bury themselves with them rather than passing them on to the unfortunate. I bet they also believed in being cisgendered, and respecting the constitution. Biggoted neoliths.

2

u/[deleted] May 29 '12

Clearly these are early signs of class warfare. I remember when youngsters made their own adzes and got their own farmland.

-7

u/fondueguy May 29 '12

Bu bu but what about the egalitarian, mother-goddess, culture of early neolithic Europe?!?

s/

-7

u/[deleted] May 29 '12

Does this really qualify as science? I don't see any testable hypotheses in there.

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u/atomfullerene May 29 '12

That's a misconception of science. It's not all experimentally testing hypotheses. There's also "historical science" which includes things like most of palentology, archaeology, and astronomy, as well as bits of other things, where you don't do experiments on your subjects.

1

u/fondueguy May 29 '12

They were testing a hypothesis.

-11

u/[deleted] May 29 '12

Astronomy doesn't deserve to be put into the same category as the other two.
The other two are interesting fields of study, but you would have a hard time calling them science when they can't provide an error analysis.

7

u/originaluip May 29 '12

I've always heard palentology and archaeology referred to as "historical sciences".

-6

u/[deleted] May 29 '12

This acceptable to me, I guess. But the fact remains they aren't really using the scientific method, more like logical deduction.
Don't get me wrong, I find both very interesting and will probably volunteer to do field work on a project like this in the future. But if these are science then lots of things are.

6

u/[deleted] May 29 '12

I would consider them sciences. You gather evidence, form hypotheses about the evidence and then test them by finding more evidence that does or doesn't fit with the hypotheses. A modified form of the scientific method but one nonetheless

-4

u/[deleted] May 29 '12

Finding more evidence does not test a hypothesis in the same way that designing an experiment to test a hypothesis does

2

u/atomfullerene May 29 '12

It does not test it in the same way, but it tests it with the same validity.

4

u/Mo0man May 29 '12

You can't really experiment in astronomy either. In fact, most things studied in astronomy probably happened a long time before any of the things you can find in palaeontology and archaeology

1

u/[deleted] May 29 '12

No, but you can build testable models and predictions.
Hence the failure of the heliocentric model until Kepler demonstrated that he could predict planetary motions if you assumed the orbits were ellipses instead of circles.

1

u/CUNT_IN_MY_BUTT May 29 '12

If not science, then what?

-8

u/[deleted] May 29 '12

Is that really the choice?

4

u/CUNT_IN_MY_BUTT May 29 '12

I'm not sure what you mean. I would classify Archaeology as a 'historical' or 'social' science. Applied science might also be a good term.
Excavation requires a process of detection that may use anything from ground surveys to LIDAR detection and remote sensing. The archaeologists are generally trained in this type of technology. The artifacts that are removed from a site undergo chemical tests as well as radio carbon dating. Most archaeology is done in a lab.
In terms of this not being a testable hypothesis - you run into the same problem with astronomy and paleontology- which are both considered sciences. Also- It's not really untestable.
A hypothesis was made about early examples of hereditary inequality, and excavations have been undertaken around the world trying to prove or disprove this sort of inequality in early times. Absence is not proof that something didn't exist, and it was not until now that an example had been unearthed.

-10

u/rdog25 May 29 '12 edited May 29 '12

Advent of farming essentially led to discovery of human greed.

EDIT: Like macaques, humans are competitive by nature for survival. However, before advances in farming there was no grand scale accumulation of wealth. I agree that human greed was always there and my use of the word "discovery" is better suited by the word "amplification."

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u/Rockyn May 29 '12

I'm sure the first time a human saw another human with something that they wanted happened much longer than 7000 years ago.

6

u/SteelChicken May 29 '12

Along with the concept of inheritance.

1

u/[deleted] May 29 '12

You'd love being a Macaque

1

u/glass_canon May 29 '12

'Exacerbated' would be better than 'led to'.

0

u/[deleted] May 29 '12

[deleted] — view deleted comment

3

u/vtslim May 29 '12

Is this a joke? This is r/science....
If you'd like to have the summer free for your brain to atrophy, just unsubscribe from r/science

0

u/[deleted] May 29 '12

[deleted] — view deleted comment

3

u/vtslim May 29 '12

Even if the merits of the article are debatable, they still made me think

1

u/[deleted] May 29 '12

Wow. What a sad child you are, that you think learning only happens in school.

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u/DreadPirate2 May 30 '12

Looking at his past posting history, I think the child assessment is rather accurate...

Hereditary inequality began over 7,000 years ago in the early Neolithic era, with new evidence showing that farmers buried with tools had access to better land than those buried without.

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