I've never "simply assumed" that top-down, centralized government instantly appeared as soon as people began farming & living together in large numbers. Early farmers must still have been profoundly marked by hundreds of thousands of years just spent as egalitarian hunter-gatherer.
The key point, in my view, is: "more participatory (then) than almost any urban government today". Yes, whatever may have pertained back in the mists of the earlier Holocene, the fact is that more recent civilization is very much top-down wherever one looks.
Indeed, top-down is so pervasive that there must be a fundamental cause for the transformation. In "Civilized to Death", Christopher Ryan compares modern humans to locusts, noting that no locust ever existed that had not once been a grasshopper. The two are the same species. But when conditions change sufficiently, the latter becomes the former, & the creature's behaviour changes radically.
The Holocene must have represented the new environment that would eventually trigger such a change in the way humans live together.
If I'm understanding the historical scenarios laid out correctly: social hierarchy arose either from:
1) The people of densely populated urban centers themselves
2) The people in outlying societies neighboring densely populated urban centers
Either way, social hierarchy seems to come as a reaction to densely populated urban centers; the outcome is the same, correct? It seems perfectly possible to have large urban populations of humans without the need of social hierarchy, but inevitably, it will arise either way.
I've never "simply assumed" that top-down, centralized government instantly appeared as soon as people began farming & living together in large numbers. Early farmers must still have been profoundly marked by hundreds of thousands of years just spent as egalitarian hunter-gatherer.
The key point, in my view, is: "more participatory (then) than almost any urban government today". Yes, whatever may have pertained back in the mists of the earlier Holocene, the fact is that more recent civilization is very much top-down wherever one looks.
Indeed, top-down is so pervasive that there must be a fundamental cause for the transformation. In "Civilized to Death", Christopher Ryan compares modern humans to locusts, noting that no locust ever existed that had not once been a grasshopper. The two are the same species. But when conditions change sufficiently, the latter becomes the former, & the creature's behaviour changes radically.
The Holocene must have represented the new environment that would eventually trigger such a change in the way humans live together.
If I'm understanding the historical scenarios laid out correctly: social hierarchy arose either from:
1) The people of densely populated urban centers themselves
2) The people in outlying societies neighboring densely populated urban centers
Either way, social hierarchy seems to come as a reaction to densely populated urban centers; the outcome is the same, correct? It seems perfectly possible to have large urban populations of humans without the need of social hierarchy, but inevitably, it will arise either way.