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Kelly examines the formation of social inequality, a subject of long-standing interest in anthropology. The intergenerational transfer of wealth plays a role in the formation of inequality, and as its subject. The formation of social inequality is fascinating precisely because egalitarianism is so \"fiercely\" maintained in small-scale, nomadic, foraging communities. Various kinds of leveling mechanisms ensure that no one can lord it over another. If living hunter-gatherers provide any sort of guide at all, or if they at least provide a working hypothesis, then that fierce egalitarianism probably characterized foragers in the late Pleistocene and early Holocene.

Shennan comments on Smith et al's Intergenerational Wealth Transmission and Inequality in Premodern Societies. The authors indicate that the key to the growth of inequality in the Holocene is the greatly increased potential offered by certain forms of agriculture for more or less unlimited inequality arising from the inheritance of material resources, because of the great potential that they create for the rich to get richer over the generations, in comparison with the more limited and less reliable possibilities offered by embodied and relational wealth. On this basis, their attack on the often-made claim that the key to the inequality generated by agriculture is the possibility of surplus generation is entirely convincing; rather, surplus generation is a by-product of the differential accumulation of scarce and predictable productive material resources--capital, in other words--through inheritance.

Commentary on a special section of articles titled \"Intergenerational Wealth Transmission and Inequality in Premodern Societies.\". Adapted from the source document.

Ames comments on Smith et al's set of papers, the Intergenerational Wealth Transmission and Inequality in Premodem Societies. The most important results of these papers are the changes across the four production modes in the kinds of wealth present and how they are transmitted. Wealth among hunter-gatherers and horticulturalists is primarily embodied and relational, while among pastoralists and intensive agriculturalists, it is principally material suggesting that contrasts across these production modes in the strength of wealth differences are the consequence of the predominant forms of wealth being transferred rather than, for example, the presence or absence of economic surpluses. Large surpluses are commonly invoked to explain why extreme levels of inequality seem correlated primarily, although not always, with intensive agriculture. In the absence of intensive agriculture, it becomes necessary to invoke environmental richness and/or stability to explain surplus production. These results appear to make that argument unnecessary, shifting the explanatory focus to the hows and whys of the evolution of material wealth.

Pryor reviews several essays that provide a model analysis of a sadly neglected topic, the distribution of wealth and inheritance in nonstate societies. They define three different types of wealth, measure the inequalities of holdings and inheritance arrangements within four groups of societies with the same economic systems, and then analyze similarities and differences between the four groups. The statistical methods employed are sophisticated, and the exposition of the results is clear.

Some things about early societies are easy to measure, some very difficult. In societies with labor markets, for example, the material livings standard of the common person is inferable from a few individual wage observations. However, measuring inequality is difficult. Inequality is about variance as opposed to means, and estimating variance requires much more information. Here, Clark suggests that while the link between parents' and children's wealth or status is an important and easily measured determinant of inequality, it will not completely measure inequality fully about long-run social mobility.

The growth of detailed and long-term ethnographic studies makes it possible today to pose more rigorous questions, to test them with a broader range of comparative data, and to thereby further anthropological theory. The authors are pioneering in taking advantage of this rich accumulated data, while they simultaneously and refreshingly return to an older tradition of comparative anthropological scholarship, grounded in a holistic analysis of a limited number of cases. Here, Hakansson discusses some of the findings and implications of their studies.

Commentary on a special section of articles titled \"Intergenerational Wealth Transmission and Inequality in Premodern Societies.\". Adapted from the source document.

Commentary on a special section of articles titled \"Intergenerational Wealth Transmission and Inequality in Premodern Societies.\". Adapted from the source document.

Flinn argues that the deep evolutionary roots of inequality are evident in the complex hormonal and psychological responses to social status and its profound effects on human health. Like all other organisms, humans evolved to \"use the least energy and take the lowest risks in securing the highest quality and quantity of resources and converting them into their own genetic materials\". This dictum from evolutionary biology is not easily translated into human economics. Humans are extraordinarily social creatures; humans habitually gather, control, and redistribute resources via group networks. Relationships trump individual material utility. Marriage, kinship, and alliance are paramount. Among humans, securing resources for reproduction involves social power.