Apparently that's the key -
"... resource concentration is a key factor in explaining
inequality among both farmers and the ancient salmon fishers.
“Those societies had in a natural state exactly the
same kind of concentration of resources that farming made possible
everywhere,”
Bowles says. “Farming vastly increased the
productivity of small patches of land and a small number of animals.”
People who
owned particularly fertile patches of farmland had a
good shot at becoming wealthy and passing on that wealth, in part
because
the land was defendable against others.
As agricultural societies developed, so
did more elaborate hierarchies, evolving into hereditary chiefdoms and
eventually
kingdoms. In these complex societies, chiefs and
kings came up with new strategies for amassing surpluses and
concentrating
wealth and power. Many chiefs created economic
bottlenecks in trade routes, noted economic anthropologist Timothy Earle
of
Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, in a
2011 paper in Social Evolution & History. These leaders
then collected payments from merchants for safe passage and used the
surplus to finance specialized warriors
to defend and extend their rule. Material culture
also became ever more sophisticated, multiplying into innumerable kinds
of highly concentrated and easily transmitted forms
of wealth, from copper ingots to gold jewelry. All of these trends led
to ever greater levels of inequality. "
Context here - http://www.sciencemag.org/content/344/6186/822.full
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