Prehistoric cultures: Paleolithic tool traditions, the Neolithic revolution, state formation

Intuition Beginner

For 95 percent of human history we lived as hunter-gatherers, in the span archaeologists call the Paleolithic, or Old Stone Age. The earliest stone tools — the Oldowan tradition, from 2.6 million years ago — were simple choppers and sharp flakes made by early hominins in Africa. They were the first technology: edges struck from stone to cut meat and crack bones.

The Acheulean tradition, beginning 1.7 million years ago, produced the handaxe — a symmetrical teardrop shape worked on both faces, carried across Africa, Europe, and Asia by Homo erectus. The Mousterian, from 300,000 years ago, was the craft of Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens: carefully prepared cores yielding uniform flakes. Each tradition refined on what came before.

The Upper Paleolithic, starting about 50,000 years ago, brought a burst of creativity. Blade tools, beads, and burials with grave goods appear, and with them the first art — the animal paintings of Lascaux and Chauvet, Venus figurines, engraved bones. This is the signature of fully symbolic behaviour: humans representing, decorating, and imagining.

About 12,000 years ago the Neolithic revolution reshaped daily life. People domesticated plants — wheat, barley, rice, maize — and animals — sheep, goats, cattle — and settled in permanent villages. Farming fed far larger populations, but at a price: early farmers were shorter, sicker, and died younger than the hunter-gatherers before them.

The first cities and states arose around 5,000 years ago in Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus Valley, China, Mesoamerica, and the Andes. Writing, monuments, social classes, and centralized government appeared together — the building blocks of every civilization since.

Visual Beginner

The table below traces the major stone-tool traditions of the Paleolithic. Each tradition is named for its type site and indexed by a "Mode" number that archaeologists use to compare industries across regions.

Tradition	Mode	Approx. dates	Makers	Diagnostic form
Oldowan	1	2.6 Mya – 1.7 Mya	Early Homo (habilis)	Simple flakes and choppers
Acheulean	2	1.7 Mya – 200 kya	Homo erectus	Bifacial handaxe
Mousterian	3	300 – 40 kya	Neanderthals, early H. sapiens	Prepared-core (Levallois) flakes
Upper Paleolithic	4	50 – 12 kya	Homo sapiens	Blades, burins, art
Microlithic	5	20 kya onward	H. sapiens	Small backed geometric insets

Domestication centre	Approx. date	Crops	Animals
Fertile Crescent	~10,000 BCE	Wheat, barley	Sheep, goats
Yangtze / Yellow River	~7000 BCE	Rice, millet	Pigs
Mesoamerica	~7000 BCE	Maize, beans, squash	Turkey
Andes	~5000 BCE	Potato, quinoa	Llama, alpaca
Sub-Saharan Africa	~3000 BCE	Sorghum, pearl millet, yams	Cattle
Eastern US	~2500 BCE	Sunflower, goosefoot	(few animals)

Worked example Beginner

Example 1: Reading a stone-tool sequence

A trench in East Africa holds three layers. The deepest contains Oldowan choppers — crude flakes knocked from river cobbles. Above them sit Acheulean handaxes, symmetrical and worked on both faces. Near the top are long, narrow Upper Paleolithic blades. Because deeper is older, the sequence traces the refinement of stone-working over hundreds of thousands of years: from smashing off an edge, to shaping the whole tool, to producing standardised blades.

Example 2: Why farming spread across Europe

Once farming began in the Fertile Crescent about 10,000 years ago, it moved west across Europe at roughly one kilometre per year. Two explanations compete. Demic diffusion says farmers themselves migrated, displacing or absorbing local hunter-gatherers. Cultural transmission says hunter-gatherers adopted crops and livestock from neighbours. Ancient DNA now shows that early European farmers were largely of Near Eastern ancestry — strong evidence that people, not just ideas, carried agriculture westward.

Example 3: Mohenjo-daro and the planned city

In the Indus Valley around 2600 BCE, Mohenjo-daro covered hundreds of hectares with a grid of brick streets, standardised house plans, and a covered drainage system. Its Great Bath, granary, and citadel suggest central coordination, yet no royal palace stands out. Unlike Mesopotamia or Egypt, Indus cities show urban order without conspicuous royal monuments — a distinctive and still-debated form of early state organisation.

Check your understanding Beginner

Formal definition Intermediate+

Paleolithic subdivisions and tool industries

The Paleolithic is divided into Lower, Middle, and Upper phases, each associated with distinct tool industries classified by a "Mode" system that allows cross-regional comparison. The Lower Paleolithic (2.6 Mya – 300 kya) contains the Oldowan (Mode 1 — simple flakes and choppers struck from cobbles, made by early Homo) and the Acheulean (Mode 2 — bifacial handaxes, the signature of Homo erectus, widespread across Africa, Europe, and western Asia but conspicuously absent from some regions such as island Southeast Asia). The Middle Paleolithic (300 – 40 kya) is dominated by the Mousterian (Mode 3 — prepared-core or Levallois techniques producing standardised flakes), associated with Neanderthals in Eurasia and early Homo sapiens in Africa.

The Upper Paleolithic (50 – 12 kya) brings Mode 4 industries — blade-based, regionally varied traditions including the Chatelperronian, Aurignacian, Gravettian, Solutrean, and Magdalenian of Europe, alongside parallel African and Asian blade industries. Mode 5 (microlithic) describes the small geometric insets that characterise the Mesolithic and later composite tools. The Upper Paleolithic also carries the first unambiguous art: cave paintings (Lascaux ~17,000 BP, Chauvet ~32,000 BP, Altamira, Cosquer), Venus figurines of the Gravettian (Willendorf, Lespugue), portable art, beads, and formal burials.

Out of Africa

Anatomically modern Homo sapiens originated in Africa roughly 300,000 BP. Genetic and archaeological evidence places the main dispersal out of Africa between 70,000 and 50,000 BP. The relationship between incoming modern humans and archaic Eurasian populations — Neanderthals and Denisovans — was long debated as replacement versus assimilation. Ancient DNA has settled much of the question: non-African populations carry 1–4 percent Neanderthal ancestry, and Oceanian and some Asian populations carry Denisovan admixture, confirming limited but real interbreeding.

The Neolithic revolution

Domestication occurred independently in at least six centres. The Fertile Crescent produced wheat (einkorn, emmer), barley, sheep, and goats by ~10,000 BCE. The Yangtze and Yellow River domesticated rice and millet with pigs. Mesoamerica gave rise to maize, beans, and squash. The Andes produced potatoes, quinoa, llamas, and alpacas. Sub-Saharan Africa contributed sorghum, pearl millet, yams, and cattle. The Eastern United States domesticated sunflower, goosefoot, and sumpweed. Vere Gordon Childe coined the term "Neolithic revolution" for the combined package of sedentism, agriculture, pottery, and ground-stone tools.

The process of domestication was coevolutionary rather than a single invention. Wild progenitors such as einkorn and emmer wheat were gradually reshaped by human selection, producing a domestication syndrome: loss of seed dispersal mechanisms, larger seeds, and loss of dormancy. The transition took millennia, not years. Its consequences were profound — population growth, permanent villages (Jericho ~9000 BCE, Catalhoyuk ~7000 BCE), pottery, weaving, food storage, and social stratification — accompanied by declining health documented by Cohen and Armelagos through paleopathology.

State formation

Childe's second revolution, the "urban revolution," describes the rise of the first cities and states. Andrew Sherratt added the secondary products revolution — the exploitation of animals for milk, traction, and wool, not just meat. Competing theories explain why states formed: Karl Wittfogel's hydraulic hypothesis linked irrigation to centralisation (controversial and not universal); Ester Boserup argued population pressure drove intensification; Robert Carneiro proposed warfare and circumscription — where agricultural land is hemmed in by unproductive land, defeated peoples cannot flee and are forcibly incorporated.

Elman Service's evolutionary sequence — band, tribe, chiefdom, state — organises the trajectory, with chiefdoms visible in the archaeological record (Mississippian Cahokia, the Olmec, Yangshao–Dawenkou–Longshan in China). Pristine states arose in Mesopotamia (Sumerian city-states, Uruk, cuneiform writing ~3500 BCE), Egypt (Narmer's unification ~3100 BCE), the Indus Valley (Harappa, Mohenjo-daro ~2600 BCE), China (Erlitou, Shang oracle bones ~1600 BCE), Mesoamerica (Olmec, Maya, Teotihuacan), and the Andes (Caral, Chavin, Moche, Inca). Their shared features — cities, writing, monumental architecture, social stratification, centralised government, specialisation, tribute, and standing armies — define the archaic state.

Key result: the Neolithic transition and the urban revolution Intermediate+

Childe's two revolutions

Vere Gordon Childe's framework, set out in Man Makes Himself (1936), identifies two great transformations. The Neolithic revolution is the shift from food procurement (foraging) to food production (farming and herding), bringing sedentism, surplus, and new social forms. The urban revolution is the subsequent concentration of population, specialised production, and administrative hierarchy into cities and states. Childe, a Marxist, framed both as revolutions in the means of production. The framework remains influential even as its details have been revised: the transitions were slower, more regional, and more variable than Childe imagined.

Key result: the trajectory from foraging bands to pristine states

The key result of this unit is a coherent narrative linking three transformations. First, the cumulative refinement of stone-tool traditions (Oldowan to Upper Paleolithic) tracks increasing cognitive and symbolic sophistication over two and a half million years. Second, the Neolithic revolution — domestication and sedentism, arising independently in six centres — converts mobile foragers into settled farmers, enabling surplus, population growth, and new forms of inequality. Third, state formation concentrates surplus, labour, and coercion into centralised institutions: cities, writing, monuments, and stratified society.

This trajectory is neither inevitable nor uniform. Domestication sometimes failed to lead to states (the Pacific Northwest retained complex foragers); some regions developed cities without obvious royal authority (the Indus); and the health costs of agriculture remain debated. The force of the key result lies in the correlation between surplus production and political complexity: where farming produced storable surplus, hierarchical institutions tended to follow, but through varied and contested pathways.

Theories of state formation compared

No single theory explains every pristine state. Carneiro's circumscription works for river valleys bounded by desert or jungle (Peru, Mesopotamia) but less so for open temperate landscapes. Wittfogel's hydraulic hypothesis fits irrigation-intensive regions but falters where cities preceded large-scale water management — Robert McC. Adams showed Mesopotamian urbanism arose before extensive irrigation. Boserup's population pressure explains intensification but not why some dense populations never centralised. Michael Mann's IEMP model (ideological, economic, military, political power sources) offers a multi-causal alternative. Morton Fried's sequence — egalitarian, ranked, stratified, state — parallels Service's but stresses the emergence of stratified access to resources as the decisive step.

Exercises Intermediate+

Advanced results: current debates in prehistoric archaeology Master

The origins of modern behaviour

The most consequential debate in Paleolithic archaeology concerns when and how fully modern behaviour emerged. Richard Klein's "dawn of human culture" hypothesis places a sharp transition around 50,000 BP, attributed to a neural reorganisation that enabled symbolic thought and sparked the Upper Paleolithic creative explosion. Sally McBrearty and Alison Brooks's "The Revolution That Wasn't" (2000) dismantles this picture, arguing that the components of modern behaviour — blade technology, pigment use, long-distance exchange, symbolic objects — accumulated gradually in Africa over more than 200,000 years. The Blombos Cave finds (Christopher Henshilwood) — ochre engravings and shell beads dated to 75,000 BP — and Lyn Wadley's compound-adhesive hafting at Sibudu Cave (~70,000 BP) strongly support the gradual-accumulation model. The "explosion" seen in Upper Paleolithic Europe may reflect preservation bias and sampling, not a real cognitive threshold.

The Middle-Upper Paleolithic transition and the Neanderthals

The Chatelperronian industry of France and Spain sits at the boundary between Mousterian and Aurignacian and is central to the Neanderthal question. Was it made by Neanderthals independently, or does it reflect acculturation from incoming modern humans? Jean-Jacques Hublin and colleagues have argued for acculturation, while Francesco d'Errico and Joao Zilhao defend an independent Neanderthal authorship. The broader evidence for Neanderthal symbolic capacity — pigments, personal ornaments, care for the elderly and injured (La Chapelle-aux-Saints, Shanidar), and the Grotte du Renne Chatelperronian — has reframed Neanderthals as cognitively closer to us than earlier generations assumed.

Out of Africa and archaic admixture

The multi-regional versus recent-African-origin debate was transformed by genetics. The 1987 Cann-Stoneking-Wilson "mitochondrial Eve" paper established a recent African root for modern human matrilines; Y-chromosome data confirmed the pattern for patrilines. The decisive evidence came from ancient DNA: the 2010 Neanderthal genome (Green, Krause, Briggs, Prufer, Paabo) demonstrated 1–4 percent Neanderthal ancestry in all non-Africans, and Denisovan admixture was identified in Oceanian and some Asian populations. The replacement model has been replaced by replacement with admixture: modern humans largely supplanted archaic Eurasians but absorbed genetic contributions from them. Radiation dates and dispersal routes remain under active revision, with evidence for multiple out-of-Africa movements.

Neolithic origins and the spread of agriculture

Current models treat agriculture as a coevolutionary process rather than an invention. Bettinger, Richerson, and Boyd frame it as a lagged adaptation driven by feedback between human behaviour and plant or animal populations. Jean-Pierre Bocquet-Appel documented the Neolithic demographic transition — a rise in fertility detectable in skeletal populations, attributed to shortened birth spacing under sedentism. The spread across Europe pits demic diffusion (Ammerman and Cavalli-Sforza's wave of advance) against cultural transmission: ancient DNA (Haak, Lazaridis, Reich) shows Near-Eastern-derived farmers largely replaced Mesolithic hunter-gatherers, with the LBK and Cardial Ware cultures as archaeological signatures. Larson and Fuller's ongoing synthesis integrates genetics and archaeobotany; rice domestication genetics (Molina and colleagues) and Chinese millet neolithisation (Yangshao) show parallel but distinct trajectories east of the Fertile Crescent.

Consequences of agriculture revisited

The view that agriculture harmed health — Mark Nathan Cohen's Health and the Rise of Civilization and Jared Diamond's "Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race" — remains influential but contested. Paleopathology documents shorter stature, more infectious disease, and enamel hypoplasia in early farmers. Yet Ashton and Speth, and Gurven and Kaplan, emphasise enormous variability across hunter-gatherer societies, some of which were robust and well nourished. The link between sedentism and inequality is similarly nuanced: Bowles and Choi argue that agricultural inheritance and property rights drove inequality; Borgerhoff Mulder and colleagues document differential wealth transmission among pastoralists; Laura Betzig links despotism to reproductive success. Smayza and Mattison stress cross-cultural variation rather than a single trajectory.

State formation theories in dialogue

Theories of state formation have multiplied without converging. Carneiro's circumscription, Wittfogel's hydraulic hypothesis (critiqued by Adams, who showed Mesopotamian cities preceded large-scale irrigation), Boserup's population pressure, and Mann's IEMP model each illuminate some cases. Henri Claessen and Peter Skalnik developed a comparative early-state model; Norman Yoffee's Myths of the Archaic State critiques naive evolutionism; Jason Ur's work at Tell Hamoukar documents urbanism without a state — complex societies preceding centralised authority. Jennings challenges the pristine-state model itself, arguing for multi-causal, networked emergence. Michael E. Smith's The Comparative Archaeology of Complex Societies and the Yoffee-Cowgill volume provide the comparative apparatus, while Susan Keech McIntosh's Middle Niger research reveals clustered cities without centralisation — a counter-example to unilineal models.

Collapse and resilience

Joseph Tainter's The Collapse of Complex Societies frames collapse as the diminishing returns of increasing complexity: societies invest ever more in bureaucracy and infrastructure until the marginal return turns negative, and the structure simplifies abruptly. Diamond's Collapse applies environmental determinism to a suite of cases, a framing McAnany and Yoffee's Questioning Collapse rejects in favour of resilience and transformation. Karl Butzer reads collapse as political ecology rather than sudden catastrophe. Natural triggers — the Minoan eruption, Late Antique climate deterioration and plague documented by McCormick — interact with political and economic fragility. The current consensus treats collapse as a reorganisation, not a disappearance: populations persist even as institutions decentralise.

Early writing systems

Writing emerged independently in at least four settings. Denise Schmandt-Besserat traced Mesopotamian cuneiform from clay counting tokens to impressed signs to full script; Jerrold Cooper details Sumerian and Akkadian. Egyptian hieroglyphs (John Ray) emerged nearly simultaneously. The Indus script remains undeciphered (Asko Parpola; Rajesh Rao), and its status as full writing is debated. Chinese oracle-bone inscriptions (David Keightley) document the earliest East Asian writing. Maya glyphs were deciphered through the work of Yuri Knorosov, David Stuart, Stephen Houston, Simon Martin, and Nikolai Grube. Andean quipu — knotted-cord records studied by Marcia Ascher and Gary Urton — encode quantitative and possibly narrative information without graphic signs, expanding what counts as a recording system.

Connections Master

• Archaeology: material culture and excavation 31.03.01. This unit builds directly on the artefact, ecofact, and feature concepts of 31.03.01, applying them to the specific sequences — stone tools, domesticates, cities — that organise the prehistoric record. Without the foundational vocabulary of material culture, the trajectories traced here could not be reconstructed.

• Archaeological methods 31.03.02 pending. Stratigraphy orders the tool traditions; radiocarbon and dendrochronology date the Neolithic and early states; LiDAR and remote sensing reveal the scale of Indus and Maya urbanism. Every chronology and settlement pattern cited in this unit depends on the methods of the preceding unit.

• Biological anthropology and hominin evolution 31.04.01. The Paleolithic tool traditions map onto hominin species — Oldowan with early Homo, Acheulean with Homo erectus, Mousterian with Neanderthals. The Out-of-Africa and admixture questions are jointly biological and archaeological, resolved only by combining fossils, stone tools, and ancient DNA.

• Linguistic anthropology 31.05.01. The origin of writing is an archaeological question (this unit) and a linguistic one. Cuneiform, hieroglyphs, oracle bones, and Maya glyphs sit at the boundary between prehistory and history, and their decipherment depends on both fields.

• Cultural anthropology and ethnography 31.02.01. Ethnographic analogies from living hunter-gatherers and horticulturalists inform reconstructions of Palaeolithic and Neolithic life, while Service's band-tribe-chiefdom-state scheme draws on ethnographic as well as archaeological data.

• Geology and earth science [27]. Pleistocene climate cycles, sea-level change, and the geography of domestication centres structure the narratives of this unit. Palaeoenvironmental reconstruction links archaeology to earth science.

• History of science [33]. Childe's revolutions, the radiocarbon revolution, and the ancient-DNA revolution are case studies in how new methods and theoretical commitments reshape a discipline's account of the human past.

Historical and philosophical context Master

Childe and the revolutions

Vere Gordon Childe, working in the 1920s and 1930s, gave prehistoric archaeology its grand narrative. Man Makes Himself (1936) and What Happened in History (1942) cast the Neolithic and urban revolutions as the two decisive turns in human progress, framed in Marxist terms as transformations of the means of production. Childe synthesised the European culture-historical record into a coherent story of technological and social advance. His scheme — Palaeolithic, Neolithic, Urban — remains the backbone of introductory teaching even as specialists have dismantled its specifics: the transitions were slower, more regional, and less uniformly beneficial than he supposed.

The processual turn and ecological explanation

The 1960s processual archaeology of Lewis Binford and Kent Flannery reframed the Neolithic and state-formation questions in ecological and systems-theoretic terms. Agriculture was explained as an adaptive response to post-glacial environmental change and population pressure; states as centralised responses to the management of surplus, irrigation, and exchange. This produced testable models — Boserup on intensification, Binford on mobility and subsistence — but was criticised for functionalism and for underplaying agency and meaning.

The demic-diffusion debate and the molecular turn

Ammerman and Cavalli-Sforza's 1973 "wave of advance" model for the spread of farming into Europe pitted demic diffusion against cultural transmission. The question resisted resolution by artefacts alone, since incoming farmers and acculturated foragers can leave similar material traces. The resolution came from outside traditional archaeology: ancient DNA, from 2010 onward, demonstrated that early European farmers were predominantly of Near-Eastern ancestry. This molecular turn — paralleled by stable-isotope proveniencing and lipid-residue analysis — has made prehistoric archaeology an interdisciplinary science in which genetics, chemistry, and excavation are inseparable.

Evolutionism and its critics

The band-tribe-chiefdom-state ladder, inherited from nineteenth-century unilineal evolutionism and refined by Service and Fried, has been a powerful organising device and a persistent target of critique. Norman Yoffee's Myths of the Archaic State argues that the ladder imposes a false uniformity on diverse trajectories; Susan Keech McIntosh's West African research shows that complexity need not centralise; Jason Jennings questions the very category of the "pristine state." The current consensus is pluralist: there are real patterns in the emergence of complexity, but no single sequence, cause, or threshold applies across all cases. The Neolithic and urban revolutions remain useful as compressed descriptions of long-term change, not as laws of cultural evolution.

Bibliography Master

1. Childe, V. G., Man Makes Himself (Mentor/Watts, 1936). The foundational statement of the Neolithic and urban revolutions; the grand narrative this unit revises.

2. Kottak, C. P., Anthropology: Appreciating Human Diversity, 17th ed. (McGraw-Hill, 2019). Introductory four-field text; Ch. 5–7 cover human evolution, the Neolithic, and early civilizations.

3. Haviland, W. A., Walrath, D., Prins, H. E. L. & McBride, B., Cultural Anthropology: The Human Challenge, 15th ed. (Cengage, 2017). Ch. 5–6 survey prehistory within a cultural-anthropology frame.

4. Diamond, J., Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (W. W. Norton, 1997). Geographic-determinist account of domestication and state formation; influential and contested.

5. McBrearty, S. & Brooks, A. S., "The Revolution That Wasn't: A New Interpretation of the Origin of Modern Human Behavior," Journal of Human Evolution 39(5) (2000), 453–563. The landmark argument for gradual accumulation of modern behaviours in Africa.

6. Klein, R. G., The Human Career: Human Biological and Cultural Origins, 3rd ed. (University of Chicago Press, 2009). Defends the ~50,000 BP "dawn of human culture" hypothesis.

7. Henshilwood, C. S., d'Errico, F., Yates, R., Jacobs, Z., Tribolo, C., Duller, G. A. T., et al., "Emergence of Modern Human Behavior: Middle Stone Age Engravings from South Africa," Science 295 (2002), 1278–1280. Blombos Cave ochre engravings and beads.

8. Green, R. E., Krause, J., Briggs, A. W., Maricic, T., Stenzel, U., Kircher, M., et al., "A Draft Sequence of the Neandertal Genome," Science 328 (2010), 710–722. The Neanderthal genome and the case for archaic admixture.

9. Cann, R. L., Stoneking, M. & Wilson, A. C., "Mitochondrial DNA and Human Evolution," Nature 325 (1987), 31–36. The "mitochondrial Eve" paper establishing recent African origin.

10. Reich, D., Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past (Pantheon, 2018). Synthesis of population history from ancient DNA, including Neolithic spread.

11. Ammerman, A. J. & Cavalli-Sforza, L. L., "A Population Model for the Diffusion of Early Farming in Europe," in The Explanation of Culture Change, ed. Renfrew (Duckworth, 1973), 343–357. The "wave of advance" demic-diffusion model.

12. Bettinger, R. L., Richerson, P. J. & Boyd, R., "Style, Function, and Cultural Evolutionary Processes," in Darwinian Archaeologies, ed. Maschner (Plenum, 1996). Agriculture as a coevolutionary, lagged adaptation.

13. Bocquet-Appel, J.-P., "When the World's Population Took Off: The Frontier of a Neolithic Demographic Transition," Science 333 (2011), 560–561. Documents the Neolithic demographic transition in skeletal data.

14. Cohen, M. N. & Armelagos, G. J. (eds.), Paleopathology at the Origins of Agriculture (Academic Press, 1984). The foundational compilation documenting declining health with the adoption of agriculture.

15. Diamond, J., "The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race," Discover (May 1987), 64–66. The polemical case that agriculture harmed human welfare.

16. Carneiro, R. L., "A Theory of the Origin of the State," Science 169 (1970), 733–738. The circumscription theory of state formation.

17. Wittfogel, K. A., Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (Yale University Press, 1957). The hydraulic hypothesis linking irrigation to centralised state power.

18. Mann, M., The Sources of Social Power, vol. 1: A History of Power from the Beginning to A.D. 1760 (Cambridge University Press, 1986). The IEMP model of ideological, economic, military, and political power.

19. Service, E. R., Origins of the State and Civilization: The Process of Cultural Evolution (Norton, 1975). The band-tribe-chiefdom-state evolutionary sequence.

20. Fried, M. H., The Evolution of Political Society: An Essay in Political Anthropology (Random House, 1967). Egalitarian to ranked to stratified to state trajectory.

21. Adams, R. McC., The Evolution of Urban Society: Early Mesopotamia and Prehispanic Mexico (Aldine, 1966). Comparative urbanism; critiques the hydraulic hypothesis.

22. Yoffee, N., Myths of the Archaic State: Evolution of the Earliest States, Cities, and Civilizations (Cambridge University Press, 2005). Critique of unilineal evolutionism in state formation.

23. Smith, M. E., "The Archaeological Study of Neighborhoods and Districts in Ancient Cities," Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 29(2) (2010), 137–154. Comparative archaeology of complex societies and urban form.

24. Tainter, J. A., The Collapse of Complex Societies (Cambridge University Press, 1988). Collapse as diminishing returns of increasing sociopolitical complexity.

25. Schmandt-Besserat, D., Before Writing, vol. 1: From Counting to Cuneiform (University of Texas Press, 1992). Traces the evolution of writing from clay tokens.

26. d'Errico, F., Zilhao, J., Julien, M., Baffier, D. & Pelegrin, J., "Neandertal Acculturation in Western Europe? A Critical Review of the Evidence and Its Interpretation," Current Anthropology 39 (1998), S1–S44. The Chatelperronian debate and Neanderthal symbolic capacity.

27. Boserup, E., The Conditions of Agricultural Growth: The Economics of Agrarian Change under Population Pressure (Aldine, 1965). Population pressure as a driver of agricultural intensification.