As you remember, when the neolithic farming revolution went viral our ancestors all reformed their social arrangements in a staggeringly short period of time. They found themselves living together in numbers never known before. There was a short period where the archaeological record shows egalitarian communities sharing without the evidence that points to wealth and poverty.
All of a sudden, there is a transformation, the birth of the State. Power was amassed at the top, allowing poverty to flow down onto the masses. In his 1977 book Cannibals and Kings, anthropologist Marvin Harris explores human culture and society and their evolution. In it, he devotes a chapter to the origins of the state. This paragraph nicely describes the harsh change:
