I went through that Kohler’s paper on post-neolithic wealth disparities and, honestly, I’m not impressed. Taking the size of houses and using it to calculate Gini coefficients seems to me like a shoddy methodology and a pretty far-fetched attempt to prove some (political?) bias. Just for illustration — this is how e.g. Çatalhöyük (c. 7100 — 5700 BC) looked like:

There are more reliable ways and more important factors to determine the wealth disparities and social stratification — grave goods, nutrition, different treatment in burials of men and women, clearly aristocratic dwellings with better inventory or more elaborate decoration — i.e. not merely their relative sizes which have probably more to do with other things such as size of a particular family, inter-family relationships, etc. Here’s a quick summary of Çatalhöyük economy.

The second paper you link to is intriguing, but as the authors write “current state of the research does not allow the refutation that other causes relating to the population or culture could account for this selection of those buried.” Not to mention that all of those graves are dated 3356 — 1772 BC, which puts them almost thousand years after the social stratification first emerged (if we go with Varna necropolis, or five centuries if we go with Arslantepe). Thus, I’m afraid, it’s a rather moot point.

I agree that there probably never will be a “great explanation of everything”. As Hindus allegedly say, “Maya is inscrutable”. Thus, at least the primordial how and why of this universe emerging seemingly out of nothing will almost certainly remain a mystery. That being said, we can know the reality behind it all.

I, personally, don’t like the word “god” as it has many, oftentimes pretty outlandish, connotations and subsequent implications. So I would not formulate it as “we’re all identical with a deity that underlies all natural things.” Plus, yesterday, I was told that that is panpsychism (which is still dualistic, or pluralistic), … hm, ok, here’s a video of Bernardo Kastrup (guy has Ph.D. in philosophy and another one in computer sciences, worked for CERN, Philips Research Laboratories, etc.) Just bear in mind that it’s a guy who appeared on panel with woo-master bullshitter Deepak Chopra. Anyway, although I would probably say some things in a slightly different manner, overall, he explains the topic better than I would (especially for scientifically leaning people).

I would only add, that while he skims over direct experience saying, “Yeah, I don’t say it’s not important,” I must stress, that it’s the direct experience that imbues that ontology with the morality and meaning. Or in other words, that direct experience provides answers to the questions you pose, namely, “What sort of people should we be in light of that superhuman unknown?”

Here I will paraphrase the classic — we either make ourselves miserable and weak, or we make ourselves peaceful and strong — the amount of work is the same.