For hunter-gatherers, the evidence generally points toward much less concentrated material wealth than in agricultural, pastoral, or modern state societies. But there are important qualifications.

1. Pareto's rule isn't really a law of human societies

The "80/20 rule" is a rough empirical observation associated with Vilfredo Pareto, not a universal law saying that every society will have 20% of people controlling 80% of resources.

In a hunter-gatherer society, "wealth" is also difficult to define. There may be relatively little accumulated material wealth, because people generally cannot accumulate huge stocks of land, livestock, buildings, or financial assets.

So asking whether they have an 80/20 wealth distribution is somewhat anachronistic.

2. Hunter-gatherers tend to have relatively egalitarian distributions

Anthropological research has repeatedly found that many mobile hunter-gatherer societies have strong mechanisms limiting material inequality.

For example:

• food is frequently shared;
• large differences in individual consumption are discouraged;
• possessions are relatively limited;
• important resources may be collectively controlled;
• mobility makes accumulating large quantities of goods difficult;
• social norms can actively restrain people who attempt to accumulate excessive status or material power.

This doesn't mean everyone is equal. There can be substantial differences in prestige, influence, age, sex, hunting ability, knowledge and social connections.

But material inequality is often considerably lower than in agricultural societies.

3. A particularly interesting case is wealth in "networks"

There's an important complication.

A hunter-gatherer's "wealth" may consist less of things and more of relationships.

Suppose an individual has:

• many relatives;
• extensive marriage connections;
• allies in several camps;
• obligations owed to them;
• knowledge of distant resources;
• high prestige;
• particularly valuable skills.

That person may have considerable social capital without possessing substantially more material goods.

And those relationships can function as a kind of insurance system. If you fail to find food today, someone else shares with you; in return, you are expected to share when circumstances are reversed.

So the distribution of material possessions can be relatively equal while the distribution of social influence is considerably less equal.

4. There is also an important difference between egalitarianism and equality

This distinction is easy to miss.

An egalitarian hunter-gatherer society isn't necessarily one in which everyone has exactly the same amount.

Rather, it may be a society in which large inequalities are socially prevented from becoming entrenched.

An unusually successful hunter might acquire more prestige, for example. But mechanisms of sharing can prevent that success from being converted into a permanent accumulation of material wealth.

Some societies have practices that anthropologists have described as "leveling mechanisms": boasting is discouraged, successful hunters may be expected to distribute meat widely, and attempts to dominate others can provoke social sanctions.

So you could have:

unequal ability → unequal success → relatively equal material consumption

rather than:

unequal ability → unequal success → accumulated property → inherited class inequality.

5. Agriculture changes the equation dramatically

This is one of the really important transitions in human economic history.

With agriculture comes the possibility of accumulating things that are:

• productive — land, livestock, irrigation systems;
• storable — grain, food surpluses;
• defensible — territory and property;
• inheritable — land and other assets;
• extractive — the ability to appropriate other people's labour.

That creates the possibility of a positive feedback loop:

surplus → property → inheritance → greater surplus → greater property

Eventually you can get people who own vastly more productive resources than others.

That's much more conducive to a Pareto-like distribution.

And once states emerge, you can add taxation, rents, political office, armies, slavery, debt and legal property rights, all of which can reinforce persistent inequality.

6. But hunter-gatherers aren't universally egalitarian

This is important because there's a tendency to romanticize them.

There are hunter-gatherer societies with significant inequality, particularly where populations become relatively sedentary and resources are sufficiently abundant or defensible.

For example, some societies that relied heavily on fishing or other concentrated resources could accumulate possessions and develop more pronounced status differences.

So the better statement is:

Mobile hunter-gatherer societies tend to have unusually low material inequality, but hunter-gatherer subsistence itself does not guarantee equality.

Ecology and social institutions matter enormously.

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What about the actual 80/20 ratio?

This is where I'd be cautious.

If you asked:

"What percentage of material wealth was possessed by the richest 20% of people in a typical hunter-gatherer society?"

we generally don't have the kind of quantitative historical data necessary to calculate a reliable Pareto coefficient or Gini coefficient for most prehistoric hunter-gatherer populations.

Archaeological evidence can give us clues about differences in grave goods, housing, possessions, diet, etc., while ethnographic studies can measure contemporary societies. But neither gives us a clean prehistoric household wealth distribution.

And there's an even deeper problem:

If wealth is predominantly relational rather than accumulated material property, the 80/20 question may be measuring the wrong thing.

One fascinating implication

This actually connects to your earlier questions about neoliberalism and inequality.

If we step back, human societies seem capable of organizing distribution in radically different ways.

A simplified historical trajectory might look something like:

Mobile hunter-gatherers
→ limited accumulation + extensive sharing
→ relatively low material inequality

Agriculture
→ surplus + land + inheritance
→ increasing potential for persistent inequality

States/empires
→ taxation + property + political hierarchy
→ much greater wealth concentration

Industrial capitalism
→ enormous productive surplus + private capital
→ potentially very high concentration of capital ownership

Modern welfare/democratic institutions
→ taxation + social insurance + labour organization
→ partial redistribution of that concentration

So the Pareto distribution isn't something that humans necessarily "naturally" produce. The distribution of wealth depends heavily on what kinds of wealth a society permits people to accumulate and what institutions govern its transmission.

And that is perhaps the more interesting question than whether hunter-gatherers obey 80/20: under what technological and institutional conditions does economic inequality become self-reinforcing?