World’s oldest forts upend idea that farming alone led to complex societies.

[bicicleur 2]

In remote Siberia, hunter-gatherers built complex defenses 8000 years ago.​

We can now see there are many societies in the archaeological record who are hunter-gatherers but have many of the features we traditionally assumed were associated with farmers.

https://www.science.org/content/article/world-s-oldest-forts-upend-idea-farming-alone-led-complex-societies?fbclid=IwAR26XHnCJYmrm9bcJyAjYSlfv581voIm9r_1p3KSbQd1ZOg6CjOsMyed7T4

 

[Riverman]

The only fix precondition is a stable food source which allows to keep up a larger population. We see that in the Levante as well, with Natufians, that they first settled down, and then started regular, intensified farming. Because once they got used to larger, more sedentary and complex social organisations, they tried to keep it up, even when the natural source of food diminished.

Unlike in the Levante the foragers of many other world regions weren't able to achieve that transition, since their habitat didn't provide such breeds of plants and animals to work with as effectively. But the first steps were done nevertheless. It just stopped once the food sources weren't sufficient any more.

Here too they gathered around a rich source of food - obviously:

The Amnya sites lie on a sharpbend in the Amnya River in centralSiberia, a region untouched by theNeolithic farming revolution thou-sands of years ago. Yet early hunter-gatherers there built massive fortifications, appar-ently to protect rich stores of fish oil and meat.

The fortified settlements, often situated overlooking rivers, might have been ways to stake out productive fishing spots. “When you start to get large numbers of people and storage of resources, you start to get into the world of competition,” Barker says. “Part of that is going and taking.”