This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: On the shores of Lake Eyasi in northern Tanzania, a small number of people still hunt and gather their food. Today, a Hadza hunter has taken down an animal—a kudu.
He can't carry it by himself, so he cuts his poisoned arrow from its flank, covers the carcass in dry grass to hide it from hyenas and heads home to enlist help. News spreads like wildfire across the camp. Everybody rushes to the kill.
They divide up the carcass, carry it back, then divvy it up some more. Every family gets some, and after the meat is cooked, there's more sharing still. On a good day like today, the hunter and his family retain half, but sometimes they keep much less.
People may even walk from other camps, and almost everyone from miles around is entitled to a share. The post-hunt scene above is idyllic. It paints a quintessential picture of egalitarianism and equality.
But our experience as anthropologists working with the Hadza people of Tanzania and with the Tsimane people of Bolivia's Amazon rainforest is that inequalities are part of even the most equal of societies. Furthermore, the equalities that do exist often emerge from selfish motives. Insights like ours are revising researchers' understanding of both the past and how people operate today, as inequality grows globally.
Hunter-gatherers are often at the center of heated academic battles about what it means to be human, including debates over gender, war and peace and whether humans are, by nature, egalitarian or hierarchical. Sometimes these debates oversimplify. So we pulled together hundreds of different sources covering more than a century of ethnography to find out just how egalitarian hunter-gatherer and other subsistence societies really are.
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