Intelligence and inequality: what ancient graves reveal

In Digging the elite: richer graves, lighter skin?, I found that richer burials were associated with higher education polygenic scores and scores pointing toward lighter untanned skin.

In modern societies, IQ predicts important dimensions of socioeconomic status, including educational attainment, occupational standing and income. Longitudinal research summarized by Strenze shows that intelligence measured earlier in life predicts later socioeconomic success. Family background and opportunities also matter, but the association gives us a historical question: did intelligence predict social standing in the past?

Ancient societies offered different routes to wealth and influence, from farming and trade to warfare and political leadership. Inheritance could also preserve advantage across generations. These differences make the intelligence–status relationship a question to investigate across historical settings.

Ancient people left no IQ tests or income surveys, but their graves sometimes preserve clues to their position. Weapons, jewellery, vessels and other goods represent resources committed to burial and can signal prestige or family standing. Burial richness can therefore serve as a proxy for socioeconomic status, interpreted within the relevant funerary tradition. Its meaning also depends on ritual, age, sex and preservation.

Figure 1 illustrates the contrast between lavish royal furnishing and an unfurnished grave.

Figure 1. Royal furnishing and an unfurnished burial

Ancient DNA supplies a second piece of the comparison. A polygenic score (PGS) combines variants associated with intelligence in modern research, allowing us to test their association with burial treatment. To my knowledge, this is the first reported association between a genetic score specifically for intelligence and quantified burial richness in ancient individuals. It opens an archaeological test of the intelligence–status relationship.

I will also consider why cognition and lighter-skin scores might be associated with richer burials, including inherited family status, assortative mating and preferential treatment of lighter-skinned individuals.