5,000 years of (in)equality in the Carpathian Basin: Challenging theories on social hierarchies in prehistory

The global distribution of wealth is currently the subject of controversial debate. Against this backdrop, social sciences, humanities, and economics are intensively investigating how social hierarchies arise in human communities and where these processes originate. A widely held theory to date is that the introduction of agriculture in Europe at the beginning of the Neolithic period, around 8,000 years ago, inevitably led to socially unequal communities. The introduction of the plow and the associated hereditary transfer of farming capital further intensified this process.