Archaeologists have long thought that as soon as people live in large settlements, hierarchies, poverty and wealth arise. However, Stone Age finds in Eastern Europe show that this was not the case everywhere. Was there already a competition between systems back then?
In 1972, the excavator driver Raycho Marinov actually just wanted to lay a power cable, but then he came across the world’s oldest gold treasure with his shovel. Marinov notified a museum, researchers arrived and found a burial ground from the fifth millennium BC. In Varna on the Black Sea, in what was then the communist People’s Republic of Bulgaria, archaeologists discovered evidence that people were not all the same around 6,500 years ago, but that there were apparently rich and poor people.