But he was intrigued by the fact that all immediate-return societies also spurned hierarchy, did not have chiefs, leaders, or institutional authority figures, and were intolerant of any meaningful material wealth differentials between individuals. He concluded that foragers’ attitudes to work were not purely a function of their confidence in the providence of their environment, but were also sustained by social norms and customs that ensured food and other material resources were evenly distributed. In other words, that no one was able to lord it over anyone else. And among them, one of the most important was “demand sharing.

But it is an archaeological site called Sunghir, discovered in the 1950s on the muddy banks of Klyazma River on the eastern fringes of the Russian city of Vladimir, that hints at how these populations busied themselves while waiting for the worst of winter to pass. Included among the stone tools and other more conventional bits and pieces, archaeologists there discovered several graves. None were more remarkable than the elaborate shared grave of two young boys who, sometime between 30,000 and 34,000 years ago, were buried together alongside a straightened mammoth-tusk lance in clothing decorated with nearly 10,000 laboriously carved mammoth-tusk beads, as well as pieces including a belt decorated with teeth plucked from the skulls of over a hundred foxes.

With archaeologists estimating it took up to 10,000 hours of work to carve these beads alone—roughly equivalent to five years’ full-time effort for one individual working forty hours a week—some have suggested that these boys must have enjoyed something resembling noble status, and as a result that these graves indicate formal inequality among these foragers. It is at best tenuous evidence of institutional hierarchy; after all, some egalitarian foraging societies like the Ju/’hoansi made similarly elaborate items. But the amount of time and skill involved in manufacturing the mammoth beads and other items suggests that, like the indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest, the annual work cycle for them was seasonal and that in the winter months people often focused their energies on more artistic, indoor pursuits.

And this took the form of what for now is thought to be the oldest example of monumental architecture in the ancient world: a complex of buildings, chambers, megaliths, and passageways discovered at Göbekli Tepe in the hills near Orencik in southeastern Turkey in 1994. With construction at Göbekli Tepe having begun during the tenth millennium , it is also by far the oldest evidence of large groups of people anywhere coming together to work on a very big project that had nothing obvious to do with the food quest.

In cities, material security was not based on producing food energy or other raw materials but on controlling its distribution and use. All ancient cities had marketplaces, from Athens’s sprawling agora to Rome’s somewhat more orderly forum with its boutiquelike shops.

The archaeology of ancient Sumerian cities suggests, perhaps unsurprisingly, that among the most promising trades to take up for those with ambitions of climbing the social ladder was brewing and selling beer. In part this was because beer, like wheat and silver, was a form of currency. It was also because beer houses provided loans to hard-up farmers who probably agreed to interest rates and default penalties that they would never have dreamed of accepting when sober.