I am indeed not aware how those societies worked, and I put that caveat in there because I knew someone would probably say we what about cavemen or something.

I am indeed not aware how those societies worked, and I put that caveat in there because I knew someone would probably say we what about cavemen or something. But I'm not sure you can really compare cavemen to the past 6000 or so years of attempting society at scale. For one there's fairly limited understanding of what those societies were really like. Discussions about how they were attempting to architect their economy are likely to run into walls pretty quickly. Do we have anything to suggest they were perfectly equal? Secondly, I think the constraints are much different when you're talking a few family groups mostly eating and hunting, where everyone knew and personally cared for each other, rather than 8 billion people in a highly developed and interconnected global economy. I suspect a lot of societal features and economy in general is just due to the need to scale out trust. Many things are easier when you have almost perfect knowledge of everything that's going on in your tiny group, but the larger that group gets the more you need to invent abstractions like money. The closest things that exist to those societies now is probably families or partnerships, which can operate on a broadly equal basis - though even they often don't.