How Civilization Started | The New Yorker

Source: How Civilization Started | The New Yorker

Just as I suspected!  4000 years of sedentarism before agrarianism!  As I proposed in Modern Problems Ancient Solutions, the seminal event triggering civilisation involved human beings recognising the connection between sexual activities and reproduction!  With this insight in mind, men started contriving Faustian agreements with women. They offered to subordinate themselves to women's domestic projects in return for promises of monogamy  and the possibility of half-witted immortality for them too.

The quid pro quo women exacted to compensate for this enormous downsizing of their quality of life soon became onerous.  Men began applying their hunting skills and inventiveness to automating and outsourcing responsibilities. Animals were domesticated so their own  domestication would be tolerable and perhaps unnoticed. Clever devices and quality of life improvements kept refreshing male bargaining power until men too could be outsourced, and even children became optional.

Thus, a simple explanation for historical events: Once men realised what  the excitement was all about, they could no longer let the women of their dreams out of their sight.

Hunting and gathering cultures, featuring stay-at-home moms and come-by-chance warriors, morphed into fixed communities and, a few thousand years later, agrarian cultures.

The modern world is the result.