section_path: History/Prehistoric stateless societies
section_name: Prehistoric stateless societies
paragraph_text: Prehistoric stateless societies
  
  For most of human history, people have lived in stateless societies, characterized by a lack of concentrated authority, and the absence of large inequalities in economic and political power.
  
  The anthropologist Tim Ingold writes:
  
  It is not enough to observe, in a now rather dated anthropological idiom, that hunter gatherers live in 'stateless societies', as though their social lives were somehow lacking or unfinished, waiting to be completed by the evolutionary development of a state apparatus. Rather, the principal of their socialty, as Pierre Clastres has put it, is fundamentally against the state.