We have a good idea of when and where the crops were domesticated.
10kya on was a time of climate change. It is plausible that they were just so blessed in terms of food that they could waste their time creating new problems for themselves.
> Grg in all his evil has amassed 8000 wild wheat berries but I myself have only gathered 400. Is this fair? How about everyone provides 100 berries to the one that goes to beat him in the head for the common good?
We have evidence of crop cultivation going back much further than 10kya. I would imagine they just used a different cereal than wheat. The Ohalo II site in Palestine shows cereal cultivation (Barley and Millet) 23kya. While it would certainly be interesting to have evidence of a non-cereal-cultivating metropole, the evidence doesn't quite bear that out.
The population bottleneck was far less dramatic, as it happened over centuries.
When population growth is effectively 0, the size of the male lineage of the average man is approximately 1 in each generation. But random variation means that the male lineages of most men don't survive that many generations.
Now imagine a stratified society, where elite men have more children than commoners and social status is largely hereditary from father to son. The average elite man will have >1 sons surviving into adulthood, while the average commoner will have fewer than one adult son. Repeat that over many generations, and lineages that started from an elite man will likely spread, while lineages starting from a commoner will likely go extinct.
I agree, but I think you too underestimate how random it is. The impact of being "elite" is probably tiny compared to the impact from chance, and at least historically, those in the "elite" genetically speaking weren't the ones at the very top. Kings live risky lives, as do sons of kings. A successful merchant able to provide a trades education to each of his 8 sons, would probably have far more Y-line descendants than a contemporary king.
And in the last couple of hundred years, even that "elite" (middle class) had a huge "disadvantage" in getting Y line descendants: they were early into the demographic transition, when everyone started having far fewer kids. Going from 11 kids to 3 kids 2-3 generations earlier meant that a lot of our elites (in the traditional sense) basically missed the population explosion in the last 150 years!
It's much smarter to ask, "where were they when the population explosion happened" than to prematurely imagine harem slaves.
There was a long period of time that people engaged in _accidental_ agriculture, where they collected seeds and foods to eat and sort of accidentally spread them around along migration pathways, so they probably had "fields" of edible plants around to some extent, but they probably wouldn't show up in the archeology.
"The Dawn of Everything"'s interpretation of this is that we only relied on (sedentary) agriculture when we were forced to because of climate change, overpopulation, or threat of violence from other local peoples, so there are several thousand years between evidence of capability and necessity.
Earliest fossil for homo sapiens is 315000 years old, earliest neanderthal fossils are 430000 years. Keep in mind these are fossils and they need certain conditions to fossilize to begin with.
That's a huge range of time. And the evidence that we can find is very limited. This has nothing to do with what we expect to find when we have so thoroughly documented that humans were exceptionally capable of reusing pretty much anything.
So I don't buy the certainty that there was no agricultural society. We simply cannot know that anywhere past 100k years. We can say there were no globally spread agriculture, because that would have had a much higher chance to leave some evidence, but that isn't the same thing. An agricultural society doesn't have to be global or be dominant to exist.
