Ancient 1 Percenters Were Beast-Based

By Christopher Intagliata on November 17, 2017

1%站在牛背上的祖先

撰文/播音 克里斯多弗·因塔利亚塔（Christopher Intagliata）

翻译 许楠

审校 郭晓

New World societies long ago likely had less income inequality than those in the Old World, and the difference might have been an oxen gap. Christopher Intagliata reports.

很久以前，新世界社会的收入不公似乎要比旧世界时缓和一点，而这个区别可能就是一头牛的差距。克里斯多弗•因塔利亚塔（Christopher Intagliata）报道。

The square footage of a home tends to be a measure of wealth. Compare the sizes of dwellings in a city and you'll get begin to get a picture of rich and poor, and how wealth is distributed.

房屋面积常常可以作为衡量财富的参考。只要对比城市中住宅的大小，你便可以大概了解整个城市的贫富差异和财富分配的情况。

Now researchers have used that modern metric on ancient settlements. They investigated housing-based wealth at 63 archaeological sites, from Old World places like Mesopotamia to New World sites like Mesa Verde in Colorado.

如今，研究者就使用了这种现代度量标准来衡量古代聚居地。他们调查了63个考古站的房产，从古代世界的美索不达米亚到新世界科罗拉多的梅萨维德（Mesa Verde）。

As expected, the wealth differential widened as agriculture took off. And it kept growing in the Old World. But in the Americas the gap suddenly stopped growing about 2500 years after the first crops showed up.

果然不出所料，随着农业的发展，贫富差距扩大了。而且在旧世界，差距也在持续增长。但在美洲，该差距却于农作物诞生约2500年后突然停止了增长。

"Well, this was a surprise first of all." Timothy Kohler is an archaeologist at Washington State University. His team's hypothesis for the differences between hemispheres? The Old World had large domesticated animals—and that was a game changer.

“首先，这很令人惊讶。”华盛顿州立大学的考古学家蒂莫西·科勒（Timothy Kohler）这样说道。他的团队提出了南北半球差异的假说。旧世界的人们饲养大型家畜——而这改变了游戏规则。

"Because if you have a team of oxen available, then you can farm much further from your house, farm much more land, and raise your income quite dramatically." That sort of farming is land-hungry, he says. So, over time, landowners with beasts of burden got richer at the expense of landless peasants.

“因为如果你拥有一群牛，那么你就能在离住宅更远的土地耕种，就可以耕种更多的土地，然后大大提高收入。”这是土地匮乏式的农耕形式，他说。因此，随着时间的推移，有大批牲畜的农场主就会变得更加富有，而随之而来的牺牲品则是没有土地的农民。

The study is in the journal Nature. [Timothy A. Kohler et al., Greater post-Neolithic wealth disparities in Eurasia than in North America and Mesoamerica]

该研究发表于《自然》杂志。（Timothy A. Kohler et al., Greater post-Neolithic wealth disparities in Eurasia than in North America and Mesoamerica）

Kohler says it's harder to scrutinize the holdings of the wealthy today, in an age of shell companies and offshore accounts. But he has this tip for future archaeologists:

科勒说，在现在这个空壳公司与离岸账户盛行的年代，已经很难仔细审查富人的财产了。但是他给了今后的考古学家一点提示。

"My advice to them would not be to look just at their main residence, but if they have residences in New York City or in the Bahamas or whatever, they need to add up all those residences and attribute them correctly to a single household."

“我建议他们不要只看人们的主要住所，如果研究对象在纽约或巴哈马或其他任何地方还有房屋的话，他们需要把这些房屋都加起来，然后正确地算在单独一户人家上。”

Given the modern-day stats on the wealth gap, they'll probably uncover a society even more unequal than the ancient Old World.

就当代的贫富分化来看，他们或许会发现一个比旧世界更加不公平的现代社会。

—Christopher Intagliata

——克里斯多弗•因塔利亚塔