For generations, popular imagination and fiction have often cast hunter-gatherer societies as humanity’s original egalitarian utopia—a realm free of wealth, hierarchy, and dominance, where people cooperated effortlessly, and power was evenly spread.
However, a new empirical study argues that this long-standing narrative, while appealing, is deeply misleading. In fact, researchers show that even the world’s most iconic “egalitarian” societies are far more unequal—and far more complex—than myths portray.
In a study accepted for publication in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, evolutionary anthropologists Dr. Duncan Stibbard-Hawkes of Baylor University and Dr. Chris von Rueden of the University of Richmond contend that the traditional definition of egalitarianism has been looking in the wrong place.
The researchers argue that the prevailing notion of egalitarian societies—groups characterized by true equality of wealth, power, or status—has little empirical grounding.
Even the small-scale forager communities most frequently held up as models of human equality display clear and measurable disparities across domains such as leadership influence, social capital, gender relations, material access, and reproductive success.
By reframing egalitarianism in terms of process rather than outcome, the study challenges the romanticized “noble savage” narrative and offers a more realistic understanding of human political organization relevant to both ancient and modern contexts.
“Definitions of ‘egalitarianism’, especially beyond anthropology, have often emphasized equality in resource access, prestige or rank, alongside generalized preferences for fairness and equality. However, there are no human societies where equality is genuinely realized in all areas of life.
Dr. Stibbard-Hawkes and Dr. von Rueden challenge long-standing assumptions in evolutionary psychology, political theory, and behavioral economics that have often pointed to egalitarian foragers as proof of cooperative human instincts or naturally fair social systems.
“We redefine ‘egalitarianism’ societies as those where socio-ecological circumstances enable most individuals to successfully secure their own resource access, status, and autonomy,” the researchers explain.
This shift represents more than a modest conceptual update. It effectively rewrites how researchers should understand the foundations of human social life. Putting it bluntly, researchers contend, “relative equality across all aspects of life is a fiction.”
In their paper, Dr. Stibbard-Hawkes and Dr. von Rueden dismantle the idea that any human society—past or present—achieves anything approaching complete equality.
The authors review data across seven major domains of social life, including leadership, gender, social capital, material wealth, reproduction, age-based authority, and embodied traits like strength and skill. In each case, societies widely considered egalitarian nonetheless show patterned inequalities.
For example, strength and hunting skills often influence political influence, marriage opportunities, and reproductive success. Some societies described as egalitarian historically abandoned the infirm or disabled, while others granted ritual privileges or food prerogatives to certain adult men.
Inequalities also appear in the realm of social capital. Coalitional ties, kin networks, and reputational benefits are distributed unevenly, even in small-scale societies known for food sharing and cooperative norms.
Individuals with more kin, stronger alliances, or more generous reputations tend to receive more help in conflicts, illness, or periods of scarcity. These advantages accumulate over time, forming real, persistent disparities.
Leadership, too, is not as evenly distributed as the idealized image suggests. While formal hierarchy may be limited, certain individuals consistently exercise greater influence in group decisions, conflict mediation, or communal planning.
“While leadership may be less formalized, coercive, or directly rewarding, differential influence in collective decision-making is found even in the most egalitarian contexts,” the researchers note.
Such patterns show that informal authority can emerge even when no one holds official titles or coercive power.
Gender inequalities also feature prominently in the study’s analysis. Although many forager societies grant women considerable autonomy in movement, marriage, and foraging decisions, structural differences in labor, ritual authority, exposure to violence, and control over knowledge still create predictable gender-based disparities.
Age-based inequalities likewise arise when older men gain ritual power, control over esoteric knowledge, or influence over marriage arrangements, creating gerontocratic structures that place younger individuals at a disadvantage.
Material wealth and territorial access—often assumed to be nearly absent in egalitarian groups—also show variation. Some societies allow exclusive rights to land, trees, or sections of coastline, while others rely on flexible but real territorial boundaries. Such property systems contribute to differences in resource access, inheritance opportunities, and political leverage.
Reproductive inequalities are among the most striking. Certain societies allow older or higher-status men to take multiple wives, resulting in substantial differences in reproductive success.
Meanwhile, others impose marriage arrangements that restrict the autonomy of young people, shaping who marries whom and under what circumstances. Even in societies with strong norms of monogamy, individuals with higher status or special knowledge often have more reproductive success.
Taken together, these patterns reveal that the appearance of equality in so-called egalitarian societies emerges not because individuals are committed to fairness or altruistic ideals, but because social mechanisms limit the ability of any one person to accumulate too much power.
The study argues that egalitarian dynamics often arise from competing self-interests rather than moral commitments.
“Individuals in even the most egalitarian societies, rather than having unusual nobility of purpose, or atypically pronounced other-regarding preferences for equality, are frequently concerned with securing their own resource-access, status, and autonomy,” the researchers say.
Processes such as demand-sharing, mobility, reputation management, risk-pooling, and collective resistance to dominance play central roles in checking the ambitions of would-be power holders.
These mechanisms reinforce an environment in which large disparities in wealth or influence are difficult to maintain, even as smaller inequalities persist. Instead of a society of equals, the authors portray a society of individuals constantly navigating, negotiating, and restraining one another’s ambitions.
Dr. Stibbard-Hawkes and Dr. von Rueden do not argue that inequality is natural, acceptable, or desirable. Rather, they show that the kind of total equality often imagined in popular accounts of hunter-gatherer life has simply never existed in human history.
What their work underscores is not the futility of striving for a more equal world, but the reality that equality of outcome is far harder to achieve than romantic narratives suggest.
The researchers emphasize that autonomy, mobility, and collective resistance to domination—not perfect sameness—have historically been the foundations of less hierarchical forms of social life.
These insights complicate simplistic claims about “natural” human equality or inequality. Instead, they highlight how people across cultures have continually negotiated, contested, and constrained power, often successfully preventing the formation of strong hierarchies even as other inequalities persisted.
The researchers’ reframing has implications for how scholars understand decentralized governance, how psychologists study fairness and cooperation, and how modern societies approach the problem of inequality without resorting to deterministic explanations rooted in biology or ancestry.
By shifting the focus from equality of outcomes to the processes that safeguard autonomy and limit coercion, the study offers a more grounded and nuanced understanding of human social organization.
It replaces the myth of prehistoric harmony with a portrait of dynamic individuals navigating the constant give-and-take of social life, with a portrait that resonates far more with the complexities of contemporary society.
Crucially, nothing in this framework suggests that inequality should be accepted or that attempts to reduce it are misguided. Instead, the study encourages a clearer-eyed view of how hard true equality has always been to achieve, and how much deliberate effort is required to build fairer systems.
“Though many foragers and horticulturalists show strikingly low inequality when compared to pastoralists, agriculturalists, and industrialized nation states, there are no human societies among whom equalities of power, wealth and rank are genuinely realized,” the researchers conclude.
Tim McMillan is a retired law enforcement executive, investigative reporter and co-founder of The Debrief. His writing typically focuses on defense, national security, the Intelligence Community and topics related to psychology. You can follow Tim on Twitter: @LtTimMcMillan. Tim can be reached by email: tim@thedebrief.org or through encrypted email: LtTimMcMillan@protonmail.com