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Comment by District5524 | Hacker News Reader

I think it's pretty far-fetched to draw conclusions from cultures that were at the same place like 4500 years later. How do you think they could have kept like 10000 slaves in place and convince them to remain slaves? And other Cucuteni sites had population estimates around 45 000 people...

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Being fed is a pretty good incentive most people are fine with any role in the group if they are fed. The alternative was doing everything on one’s own.

I’m sure individuals had preferred roles. I think in this day and age describing them as labor may be more accurate than slave.

Those dynamics are very very different when population densities are low and land is abundant. Without complex state/regional level hierarchies if you can just form a likeminded group in you community and move elsewhere chances that your local chieftain can't really do too much about it.

I do not have to:

> The use of house size as a proxy for the economic status and social power of households in a society is based on broad cross-cultural evidence from ethno-archaeological studies and archival sources as it has been found that household wealth and house size are correlated in many societies

Basic premise of this study is wrong, based on recorded history from the same region. Nomadic herding warriors do not live in houses, and do not leave the same mark in archaeology records.

Early agriculture can support a huge number of people, but they will be malnourished, and always be dominated by meat fed elites!

Well, no. I mean kind of. These grain-farming Cucuteni were squeezed out by the Kurgan culture, tall pastoralists coming from the East (that culture became the indo-europeans, us), the process possibly assisted by a few hundred years of drought. Ordinarily, the farmers had food surpluses, though having all the bread you can eat is not the same as having all the meat, admittedly.

Your nomadic herding warriors leave graves behind - Kurgan - as well as distinctive pottery, as clues to the general area they were being nomadic in, which was initially elsewhere while the Cucuteni were thriving. I don't think maintaining slaves at a distance works as a concept.

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