• Not_mikey@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    6 days ago

    Slavery wasn’t really a thing in pre historic Hunter gatherer society:

    “Somewhat more convincing are statistical surveys of large numbers of societies that show that slavery is rare among hunter-gatherers, is sometimes present in incipient agricultural societies, and then becomes common among societies with more advanced agriculture. Up to this point slavery seems to increase with increasing social and economic complexity.”

    Source

    Which makes sense, the benefit of slavery is that the master can expropriate all the surplus a person can generate, but hunter gatherers don’t really generate surplus. Combine this with the difficulty of keeping someone against there will without a state and people specialized in violence to keep them in line and slavery isn’t really that viable.

    In general hunter gatherer tribes were anarchic as consensus and social cohesion were necessary both to make sure you don’t starve and to be able to fight off other tribes

    • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
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      5 days ago

      Yeah, I don’t think they would have been like modern slaves but more like bully/bullied relationships where those at the bottom aren’t forced to do labour but get targetted for various forms of abuse, including sexual, which would have sometimes resulted in a child.

      They probably wouldn’t be abused by everyone in the group. Other apes like chimps show sympathy to individuals that get picked on by more dominant individuals, so I’d expect some of us were like that back then, too. But other apes also demonstrate that some individuals can just be assholes or otherwise decent but can get in bad moods.