The Pareto chart is a graphic representation of the 80/20 rule, also known as the Pareto principle. If you’re a quality improvement specialist, you know that the chart is named after the early 20th-century economist Vilfredo Pareto, who discovered that roughly 20 percent of the population in Italy owned about 80 percent of the property at that time.

You probably also know that the Pareto principle was later adopted and repurposed as a powerful business metric by Joseph Juran during the 1940s, to identify the “vital few” issues vs. the “trivial many.”

But most people don’t realize that human use of the Pareto chart goes back much earlier than this. Archaeological evidence suggests the chart could date back to the Middle Paleolithic era: using broken-off mastodon bones for bars, and hyena sinews for connect lines, it appears Stone Age humans constructed rudimentary Pareto charts to depict problems as they first began to cook with fire.

Based on the fossilized records, I used Minitab statistical software to recreate a Stone Age Pareto chart:

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