I notice that some anthropologist believe all humans were egalitarian in the past, and others believe inequality was more common they we currently we think with hunter gathers.
This seems to along with anthropologist using modern hunter gathers as way to look at the past which is now considered not a best practice from what I read. Which this influenced the egalitarian hunter gathers idea even more.
Some basic context pieced together from what I know, for anyone who's not too familiar with how anthropology addresses this: the vast, vast majority of pre-agricultural societies that exist/existed up to the 19th and 20th centuries weren't hunter/gatherers but instead what are referred to as "horticulturalists" who have established permanent or semi-permanent homes and who grow crops, may keep some livestock, and supplement that with a large amount of hunting, fishing, and/or foraging. Further, hunter/gatherers that persisted to the modern era did not do so in a vacuum and had frequent contact with both horticulturalist and later agricultural societies and so cannot represent an actual snapshot of what humans would have done and believed prior to permanent settlements and the cultivation of crops. There are also pastoralists, who historically have only ever existed as nomadic drovers trading with agricultural societies and similarly can't be viewed as a snapshot preserving pre-historic human behavior and beliefs.
Further still at this point there are no "uncontacted peoples" existing as some sort of isolated preserve of pre-historic humanity: everyone alive has been touched by the global systems of imperialism and the cultural hegemony it brought with it in some way, even if indirectly (and before this they still existed as parts of larger networks of communication and trade with agricultural civilizations in most cases). Holdouts existing in remote places aren't simply ignorant of an outside world but instead exist in conflict with capitalist interests that seek to encroach on and steal the land and resources they rely on or who have actively adopted a siege mentality after suffering abuses at the hands of imperialists (like the Sentinelese, whose hostility towards outsiders can be directly traced back to the British abducting and killing people from those islands). One can't learn about a "default" or "natural" state from them because they're not building from nothing but instinct every generation and instead have had millennia of their own cultural development and cultural exchange with other civilizations.
A lot of the anthropology that came out of studying pacific island cultures reinforces this. While it was true that you had isolated societies on islands, sometimes being uncontacted by others for centuries, there was no "natural" way for humans to end up on those islands. They migrated there, over centuries, using advanced navigation techniques. They came with tools, technologies, language, social fabric, edit: as well as animals and plants for cultivation. It was a deliberate process. If I am remembering this correctly, they would tack and sail into the wind for as long as they could. If they found no land they would turn around and use the seasonal winds to blow them back home.
I read that it was that they'd sail into the prevailing currents, but yeah the reasoning is the same: go slower on the way out, then turn around when your supplies are half gone and you have the current speeding you along so you get back to safety with supplies to spare in case something goes wrong.
There's a lot of fascinating stuff about just how you find tiny islands maybe a mile or two long at the most that are so flat you can't see them over the horizon too, like how islands leave a massive footprint in the ocean from how they change the waves and how debris from plants will float down current or with the wind, so the target for finding one isn't just a few miles wide but instead potentially tens of miles long, making it much easier to spot and home in on the islands especially if you already knew roughly where it was.
That might have been it, current instead of wind, those college courses are shrouded in memory fog :D I remember Heyerdahl getting brought up solely to debunk him, if that can kinda place where academics was at the time.