Sublime

is: it is clear now that human societies before the advent of farming were not confined to small, egalitarian bands.

The challenge of globalization from the earliest days of humanity has been the lack of consensus. Our species, exquisitely evolved for cooperation within our clan, is equally primed for conflict with the “other.” In a world that has the ability to “end all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life,” as President John F. Kennedy eloquently

science is

Intriguingly, when prosperity skyrocketed in recent centuries, it did so only in some parts of the world, triggering a second major transformation unique to our species: the emergence of immense inequality across societies.

thousands of years before the origins of farming, human societies were already divided along lines of status, class and inherited power.

Europeans were constantly squabbling for advantage; societies of the Northeast Woodlands, by contrast, guaranteed one another the means to an autonomous life – or at least ensured no man or woman was subordinated to any other.

In our view, the key to understanding how societies evolve is to understand factors that determine the costs and rewards of employing violence. Every human society, from the hunting band to the empire, has been informed by the interactions of megapolitical factors that set the prevailing version of the “laws of nature.”

The Paleolithic humans lived in small foraging bands of perhaps twenty-five to thirty members, with seasonally shifting base camps organized around the campfire.

In the premodern world, people were akin to lowly clerks in a socialist bureaucracy.