If there is a riddle here it’s this: why, after millennia of constructing and disassembling forms of hierarchy, did Homo sapiens – supposedly the wisest of apes – allow permanent and intractable systems of inequality to take root? Was this really a consequence of adopting agriculture? Of settling down in permanent villages and, later, towns?

— The dawn of everything : a new history of humanity by David Graeber, David Wengrow, David Graeber, and 1 other (Page 118 - 119)