The Human race is a primarily nomadic hunter-gatherer species, that very recently developed agriculture and settled communities. During perhaps 90-99% of our time on this planet, there was no such thing as private property, except for personal items, like some favorite tool, weapon or article of clothing, worship or decoration. And these were buried with you when you croaked.

The idea of owning property, especially real estate, would have struck most of our ancestors as ludicrous. Oh sure, people took possession of things, like good hunting grounds or a productive fruit tree or a fresh water spring, but the idea they could be traded for other things would have made about as much sense as my trading you the Marianas Trench for Mt Everest. We don't own them, at best we can only occupy them temporarily. Commerce consisted of barter--my projectile point for your fish hook. The only exception to this general rule was probably livestock. The Masai's cattle or the Amerind's ponies, (even though most anthroplogists agree husbandry followed agriculture), and the concept of property was probably borrowed from farmers.

It's not hard to imagine a level of technology that would allow us to return to what must be our natural, propertyless state. In fact, we may have that technological level already! There would still be rich and poor, there have always been people with more stuff than others, because they were smarter or luckier, or had families that were more numerous and more prosperous for whatever reason. Even then, it was considered good manners in most tribes to share--the potlach.

But our present system of property and ownership, what we call wealth, may one day be looked back at as a quaint cultural relic of a recent past, like polygamy or slavery, or the divine right of kings. Only cultural intransigence, the insistence on those with wealth to perpetuate its importance, would allow this unnatural condition to continue.