What other species of animals accumulate wealth over several generations?

The other day, my husband and I were watching birds and squirrels dig around in our garden. “They are trying to make a living,” my husband said. And it got me thinking — squirrels and birds have to find food and shelter everyday to survive. If they don’t find food, they go hungry. If they don’t find shelter, they suffer the elements and predators. Humans used to live the same day-to-day existence in our distant past. But now, we work hard to pass on the fruits of our labor to the next generation. But are there other animals that do the same?

Bees
Termites
Ants
Bunnies, gofers, mols?
Mere cats
Prairie dogs
Bats
Some birds
Beavers

Sp basically anything that lives in a large colony and anytime there is a massive construction project that lasts multiple generations. With each generation, baby animals are born into a more secure environment when it comes to food and shelter.

Humans started out as hunter-gatherers. We carried everything we owned on our backs as we moved from place to place, following food and seasons. Two things changed that behavior: agriculture — people couldn’t take their fields with them and, after so much investment into a place, giving it up would have needed a very strong motivation. And as humans dispersed into cold-weather climates, survival at low temperatures didn’t only necessitate storing food for lean months but also required shelter from the elements. Caves and other advantageous shelters were worth fighting for and defending. Agriculture and need for permanent housing changed how humans lived and their perception of what was valuable. If before, we could carry everything we owned with us as we moved from place to place, now the incentives changed. And with that, we could start to accumulate wealth, generational wealth — we had a safe place to store it all, and we were already primed to defend our homes and fields.

Permanent settlements changed how we lived and the societies we formed. While bands of hunter-gatherers were small by necessity, agricultural settlements needed human power to maintain, and thus the populations grew. Families also changed. Children got to inherit the accumulated wealth of the previous generations and there was less movement — generational wealth tied individuals to a specific location and made moving to a new one unlikely. For thousands of years, humans found themselves anchored to their places of birth. Sure there was movement, but the costs of such upheavals were high. And when people moved, they tried to take as much wealth with them as they could.

There is a wonderful photograph taken at Elis Island of a woman, Theano Papasotitiou, traveling from Greece to join her husband in San Francisco. She had pounds of gold in coins sewn into and onto her dress:

https://scalar.usc.edu/works/let-me-get-there/greek-woman-1909

“An old Greek woman who wore a lace shawl on her head and $4000 in gold coins strung on chains around her neck and arms as ornaments. She was a shrewd and intelligent individual, being fully informed about our methods, and knowing exactly how to reach San Francisco, where she was going to join her husband.”
—William Williams, Commissioner of Immigration at Ellis Island [James B. Morrow, “Keeping out the Undesirables [William Williams] keeps tab on the Tide of Immigration,” The Indianapolis Star, October 03, 1909, 35.] Sherman made at least three portraits of Theano Papasotiriou [Θεανώ Παπασωτηρίου] sometime after her arrival on the S.S. Athinai on 3 June 1909. Like many of the Chief Registry Clerk’s other subjects, Papasotiriou was detained before leaving Ellis Island, giving him an opportunity to photograph her. But unlike a number of Sherman’s other Ellis Island portraits, the subject of this photo definitely went on to become a U.S. citizen, albeit decades after her entry.

The one thing we can count on in life is that things change. And even as humans gathered their wealth as physical belongings for many thousands of years, the age came when we could do so virtually via banks, stocks, and other investments. While in previous ages, people moved to improve their life’s circumstances (e.g. migration motivated by disasters, war, and persecution); the last few decades gave us the digital nomads — individuals who feel liberated from a permanent “home” location and who are able to work their trade remotely from anywhere and save their wealth independent from the location/country they are in. Perhaps nomadic life-style has always been in us just waiting for an opportunity to return, or perhaps we engineered this opportunity just to free ourselves from physical assets we can’t carry on our backs. Either way, infrastructure was needed to make this possible: safe “location” to store wealth, availability of housing that could be rented, and a feeling of personal safety irrespective of how far we are from our community of birth. We no longer need to carry all of our acorns on our backs and know we will be welcomed, for a price, by other squirrel communities. That’s quite a level of domestication that even the most industrious bees can never achieve.

And so it goes even with stories. We have a library of thousands of books in our home. But for the last decade or more, I’ve been buying mostly digital books. Not only did we ran out of physical storage, but I can take my “library” anywhere with me! I might not be a digital nomad, but I’m a digital nomadic reader! I hope I can pass on my literary treasures to the next generation…