Gamma

...[H]unter-gatherer egalitarianism is rather a sham.  ... [E]ven the most egalitarian of them had a dominance hierarchy as clear-cut as tht in any ape society. The difference is that for humans, the alpha elite were invisible supernatural beings, far too powerful to be overthrown, while the betas were ancestors who did the bidding of the alphas.  No "egalitarian" hunter-gatherer was ever more than a gamma in the social hierarchy,.

--Steven Mithen, "Foresomes and so on," reviewing and interpreting Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus, The Creation of Inequality (2012), London Review of Books 11 April 2013, 17-18, 17.  Cf. link, link, link.

Let Me See If I Can Get This Straight...

You'd think I'd know these dates by now; I've certainly seen them often enough. But Chris Gosden provides a helpful aide-memoire:

Although a small part of the story in terms of overall time, we are most interested in people like us--Homo sapiens sapiens. We arose in Africa about 120,000 yers ago, moving out to the Middle East by 90,000 years ago and the Indian sub-continent and beyond by 70,000. Europe and Australia were both colonized aobut 50,000 years ago, the latter for the first time, and the last large landmass to receive people was the Americans 20-15,000 years ago. After that the last big movements were to islands--the Caribbean and Mediterranean islands were permanently settled around 6,000 BC, the remote Pacific islands after 1500 BC, with places like Iceland in the northern hemisphere and New Zealand in the southern being the last sizeable pieces of land people reached,about 1000 years ago.

--Chris Gosden, Prehistory Introduction (Oxford UP nd)