Agriculture is a fairly recent human invention, and in many ways it was one of
the great stupid moves of all time. Hunter|-|gatherers have thousands of wild
sources of food to subsist on. Agriculture changed that all, generating an
overwhelming reliance on a few dozen domesticated food sources, making you
extremely vulnerable to the next famine, the next locust infestation, the next
potato blight. Agriculture allowed for stockpiling of surplus resources and thus,
inevitably, the unequal stockpiling of them --- stratification of society and
the invention of classes. Thus, it allowed for the invention of poverty. I think
that the punch line of the primate|-|human difference is that when humans
invented poverty, they came up with a way of subjugating the low|-|ranking like
nothing ever seen before in the primate world.
