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Originally Posted by daisym
but it was the increased food production, and developing the skills of animal husbandry (funny word that, really) that allowed specialisation to develop. you see - there was more time to begin to develop different social models, including hierarchies. Prior to this knowledge belonged to the elders. they were old, wise, had lived a long time, and passed knowledge on. There may have been a special person who had some special role - the shaman/witch doctor - but in hunter gatherer societies this was not necessarily always the case.
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While I appreciate and agree with most of your two fine posts here, I'll beg to differ a bit on this. Hierarchy is merely a result of the recognition that one individual alone cannot overcome and even perform all tasks within a social group. Thus hierarchy is a basic requirement for social life. It is not necessarily a game of dominance but a simple game of divide and conquer, - namely dividing the tasks in order to conquer the benefits of societal living.
Nothing seems to indicate that people then were different than people are now with respect to different abilities of performing different tasks within society. The importance and methods of delegation may have been altered through different era's of technology, though. Especially during the significant switch of venturing into development of crop and stock technologies.
I don't think changes in social models were due to 'more time'. It doesn't seem likely that entering farming technologies should result in any "left-over" time. One could probably argue by comparing existing hunter/gather societies with those of, in our eyes, primitive farming that time is not an issue. Rather I think that different requirements by different technologies is the first and foremost cause for change in social models. Next are changes in environment, which may be a consequence of the former, thus enhancing both the rate and direction of change.