requirements to be met more easily, with little incentive to
work for more.
The traditional, geography-based explanation for the
Neolithic Revolution—the centerpiece of Jared Diamond’s
argument, which we discussed in chapter 2—is that it was
driven by the fortuitous availability of many plant and animal
species that could easily be domesticated. This made
farming and herding attractive and induced sedentary life.
After societies became sedentary and started farming, they
began to develop political hierarchy, religion, and
significantly more complex institutions. Though widely
accepted, the evidence from the Natufians suggests that
this traditional explanation puts the cart before the horse.
Institutional changes occurred in societies quite a while
before they made the transition to farming and were
probably the cause both of the move to sedentarism, which
reinforced the institutional changes, and subsequently of
the Neolithic Revolution. This pattern is suggested not only
by the evidence from the Hilly Flanks, which is the area
most intensively studied, but also by the preponderance of
evidence from the Americas, sub-Saharan Africa, and East
Asia.
Certainly the transition to farming led to greater
agricultural productivity and enabled a significant
expansion of population. For instance, in sites such as
Jericho and Abu Hureyra, one sees that the early farming
village was much larger than the prefarming one. In general,
villages grew by between two and six times when the
transition took place. Moreover, many of the consequences
that people have traditionally argued as having flowed from
this transition undoubtedly happened. There was greater
occupational specialization and more rapid technological
progress, and probably the development of more complex
and possibly less egalitarian political institutions. But
whether this happened in a particular place was not
determined by the availability of plant and animal species.
Instead, it was a consequence of the society’s having
experienced the types of institutional, social, and political
innovations that would have allowed sedentary life and then
farming to emerge.
Though the Long Summer and the presence of crop and
animal species allowed this to happen, it did not determine