Middle Paleolithic - Social Stratification

Social Stratification

Evidence from archeology and comparative ethnography indicates that Middle Paleolithic/Middle Stone Age people lived in small egalitarian band societies similar to those of Upper Paleolithic societies and (some) existent Hunter gatherers such as the !Kung san and the Mbuti. Both Neanderthal and modern human societies took care of the elderly members of their societies during the Middle Paleolithic. Christopher Boehm (1999) has hypothesized that egalitarianism may have arisen in Middle Paleolithic societies because of a need to distribute resources such as food and meat equally to avoid famine and ensure a stable food supply. Typically, it has been assumed that women gathered plants and firewood and men hunted and scavenged dead animals through the Paleolithic. However, recent archaeological research done by the anthropologist and archaeologist Steven Kuhn from the University of Arizona suggests that this gender-based division of labor (presumably) did not exist prior to the Upper Paleolithic in Middle Paleolithic societies (Modern humans before 40,000 or 50,000 BCE and Neanderthals) and evolved relatively recently in human prehistory. The gender-based division of labor may have evolved to allow humans to acquire food and other resources more efficiently and thus may have allowed Upper Paleolithic Homo sapiens to out-compete the Neanderthals in Europe.