Once upon a time, though not so long ago, the story of humans on the planet went like this. Variously called "the perpetual progress story" or "the march of civilization", it presented human lives as "poor, nasty, brutish, and short" through the Paleolithic, constantly on the move in an unending, bitter pursuit of animal game. The domestication of plants (especially cereals) and animals in the glorious Neolithic Revolution permitted humans to settle down and farm. Humans were happily propelled by agriculture through a quick, inevitable, brightly lit progression from villages to urban living and the undoubted blessings of "civilization". Cue relief and applause and hearty back-slapping of all.
This depiction has turned out to be nonsense, very much a fiction written by the victors in a cruel "wrong turn" of human history. The rewriting of early human history has resulted from the last three decades of archaeological research. This carefully-conducted research by professional archaeologists and anthropologists has generated a consensus about what actually transpired in this critical phase of the human story. Leading figures in this new consensus have been Yale's James Scott (Against the Grain, 2017) and Mark Elvin (An Environmental History of China, 2005).
The new discoveries indicate that changes began during the last 5,000 years of the Paleolithic, which saw humans settling down earlier than previously thought. Paleontologists renamed those years as the Mesolithic. It is this new combination of the 5,000 years of the Mesolithic (12,500 to 7,500 BCE) with the 5,000 years of the Neolithic (7,500 to 2,500 BCE) that we now know was a period of bursting change, change at utter odds with the former and now discredited "march of progress" story.
A key difference in this new understanding of the human story is the role of agriculture (which Jared Diamond famously called "the worst mistake in the history of the human race"). In the now-discredited "Perpetual Progress" version, plant and animal domestication occurred over a relatively short time and humans quickly adopted full-time agriculture, pictured as gratefully leaving the brutish hunting-gathering subsistence economy well behind altogether. The benefits of the sedentary life coupled with agriculture's benefits were claimed to propel humans quickly into cities and the start of a bright history.
Not so, reveals the new research. Firstly, domestication was a long process, and as it occurred humans did not promptly jettison hunting and gathering. In fact, the archaeological research now shows, humans continued relying primarily on their hunting-gathering economy for—ready for this?—thousands and thousands of years after domestication of plants and animals. Calorically, hunting and gathering remained their main source of sustenance, and was merely complemented by the newly domesticated plants and animals.
A corollary of this new discovery was that the use of domesticated resources was, for ten millennia, nothing like the full-time occupation that we think of when we mention "agriculture". In fact, the Meso-Neolithic humans were practicing what we today call "gardening." They were raising easily-tended polyculture plots and small, easily managed animals.
James Scott and others have long wondered why humans would abandon a subsistence economy of the congenial, leisure-packed, healthy occupation of hunting and gathering and replace it with the year-round, back-breaking drudgery of intensive farming (before machines). Good question. Scott: "Contrary to earlier assumptions, hunters and gatherers...have never looked so good—in terms of their diet, their health, and their leisure. Agriculturalists, on the contrary, have never looked so bad—in terms of their diet, their health, and their leisure…There is no reason why a forager in most environments should shift to agriculture unless forced to by population pressure or some form of coercion." The source of that "coercion": what Elvin terms the Militarized Urban-agrarian State, which we'll examine soon.
The question is now answered: early humans in fact didn't abandon hunting and gathering for full-scale farming. They kept their hunting and gathering subsistence economy and added small-scale gardening to complement it. Depending on the vagaries of weather and natural disasters, they could and did easily switch back and forth and apportion the amount of time and energy distributed amongst hunting and gathering and the new gardening.
These new discoveries, moreover, add a most unexpected twist to the appearance of full-time monoculture agriculture ("farming"). This phenomenon occurred only as a result of events during the rise of cities in the Bronze Ager after the Neolithic. These new cities were dominated and ruled by patriarchal elites whose primary occupation was war and the seizure of luxury resources from their neighbors. These new masters of civilization were clear about who was in charge. As Han Fei, adviser to the brutal Qin Shi Huangdi who founded the third-century BCE Han empire put it: "They extended congratulations on the birth of a boy; girls they killed."
It is for this reason that Elvin aptly names the early patriarchal cities as the Militarized Urban-agrarian State. That is, full-time intensive agriculture was invented by the new urban rulers and, by force of their new armies, imposed upon the former hunting-gathering-gardening populations who lived in villages in the countryside surrounding the cities.
Elvin quotes the 4th century BCE Chinese Manual of Master Guan (Guanzi Jiping) about how this critical change was accomplished by the patriarchal rulers of the cities. "One controls the people as one controls a flood. One feeds them as one feeds domestic animals. One uses them as one uses plants and trees." Elvin summarizes: "It must be remembered: fields end freedom…humanity itself became one of our own domesticated species." This change must surely be regarded as one of the most momentous in human history, and one of the most heart-breaking.
Let us turn now to a more detailed look at what these three decades of archaeological research indicate life was like for our ancestors in the Meso-Neolithic. One key difference concerns the type of society these early humans lived in. Burials, grave goods, figurines, and their art amply demonstrates that these Meso-Neolithic societies were dramatically different than the patriarchal, urban societies which followed them.
Grave goods and burials, for example, indicate that males in these hunting-gathering-gardening societies filled the roles of hunters, gardeners, artisans, and traders. Females were the gatherers, gardeners, pottery producers and decorators, and producers of dyes and medicines. These data contribute to the current archeological consensus that Meso-Neolithic villages in Europe and China were basically egalitarian among individuals and between sexes. Though some graves had a higher amount and sophistication of goods, the differences were not dramatic, probably mere reflections of individual variation in skills and success at their occupations—not an elite class or aristocracy by any means.
But much more importantly, their burials and art show that these early humans had an unexpected conviction that they were fully at home on the earth, that they recognized a deep kinship with other creatures, and that they were completely satisfied to be of the earth. This suite of convictions is termed an Immanent worldview (as opposed to our modern-day Transcendent worldview).
For example, the archaeologists unearthed many figurines of human-snake and human-bird hybrids, unmistakable blends of human traits and bird traits. And engravings on seal stones and table tops in the late Neolithic Minoan culture on Crete show human females wearing bird-masks and dancing in some sort of performance.
The burials themselves confirm the immersion of these early humans in the natural world. Virtually all of them are graves filled with the teeth and bones of birds and mammals, seashells, shells of turtles, and depictions of humans interacting with (though not dominating) animals. One grave in China has an elaborate tableau using crushed seashells to make figures of a dragon and tiger to either side of the human skeleton, with a depiction of the Big Dipper constellation to the north.
Though all this may seem deeply strange to us, it demonstrates that these early humans were fully at home in the natural world, that they accepted—and celebrated!—their kinship with the other creatures of the earth. There is no hint at all of dreaming of other realms, or wishing an escape from their earthly condition. This acceptance of the here-and-now of living on the earth and being integrally part of the grand natural cycles of the earth is termed an Immanent worldview.
How long did this Immanent view last? Ten thousand years, through both the Mesolithic and Neolithic periods (about 12,500 to 2,500 BCE)! Such a lengthy tenure of the hunting-gathering-gardening subsistence economy and its Immanent worldview could not have occurred—succeeded—without an intimate, deep understanding and focus on the natural world. Our ancestors could not have succeeded without extensive knowledge and understanding of the plants, animals, and cycles of the world in which they lived.
This intimate understanding of the natural world would lead to an abiding, long-term nurturing of that natural world, a stewardship of the earth that flows naturally to an intuitive sort of affection and caring for the earth. The earth gives us all we need, in every way; of course we must take care of it! How could it be otherwise? This in-your-bones, spontaneous understanding that we are a part of and so must protect and nurture the natural world is an important aspect of the Immanent worldview that we now know our Mesolithic and Neolithic ancestors exhibited.
The ambition, dissatisfaction, and itch for a "better" world that fills our modern times was clearly not present in Meso-Neolithic cultures. People were content, just where they were, just as they were. They accepted their lives and were in no frenzy to change them. The earth was bountiful; they knew how to tap that bounty by hunting, fishing, gathering, and gardening. They were home, and content to be there.
Progress? What in the world was "progress"? The concept was apparently not conceivable. Betterment? Why would you want anything beyond that you had, what your ancestors had, what your children would have?
This way of thinking seems incomprehensible to us moderns. It seems strange, stupid, dull. Yet for 10,000 years Meso-Neolithic humans lived very much in equilibrium, in stable societies. The cultural memory, orally-preserved through generations, of this kind of strange (to us) thinking of the Immanent worldview is reflected in the Taoist religion, a relict of the Neolithic which has improbably persisted into our modern times and been put into writing.
From Taoism's Daodejing: "He who knows he has enough is rich…Do you think you can take over the universe and improve it? I do not believe it can be done. The universe is sacred. You cannot improve it. If you try to change it, you will ruin it."
Could the people of the Meso-Neolithic really think so differently than we do? Let's listen to archaeologists who have studied the past of humanity in the Neolithic. Great Britain's Lucy Goodison and Christin Morris: "The twentieth century's preoccupation with human and emotional affairs may have overfed the search for anthropomorphic divinity…We may have been missing evidence of a very different experience and different concerns, ones to do with bones and heat, life and the dead, animals and plants, the weather and the passing of time…alignment to the cycles of the natural world."
So we finally see, then, from these past three decades of careful archaeological research, that these newly-rediscovered humans of the Meso-Neolithic's 10,000 years—a forgotten world—were at home in the world, and content to be here. Their societies were egalitarian both among individuals and between the sexes. All had their roles, some overlapping, and seemed to be happy with that. Though not a matriarchy, always were females prominent, as illustrated in a Minoan signet ring shown at the beginning of this blog, depicting a female performing a ceremony atop a mountain (always the center of the natural world) pointedly outside the new city, being protected by a pair of lions or leopards.
Yet this world—humanity's world—was dramatically upended, and vanished about 4,500 years ago (a bit earlier in the West, later in China) with the relatively sudden appearance of a constellation of factors: cities, ruled by patriarchal elites; extreme differences in the quality of life between these elites and all others; a new society with the primary function of warfare; and the avaricious accumulation from neighboring societies of luxury goods for the elite.
This change in the history of humanity was the greatest and most consequential that has ever occurred. Before, humanity was living in villages by means of hunting, gathering, and gardening. Their homes provided shelter from the elements. The living was congenial, leisure time was ample, their diets a surprisingly rich and diverse ensemble of animals and plants. Societies were egalitarian among members and between the sexes. People realized they were at home on a beneficent earth, and content to be so. There was no itch to improve their contented lives or change things. This was humanity in the 10,000 years of the Meso-Neolithic, amply shown by these past three decades of archaeological research.
And then it all changed, at about 2,500 BCE. Forever, or at least up to today. Several things appeared, relatively quickly, in an interrelated whole. Cities ruled by a patriarchal elite (and its attendant misogyny). Large armies of conscripted peasant sons, trained to murder the conscripted sons of other cities. An unquenchable desire by the patriarchal elite for luxury goods. A never-ending series of wars on neighboring cities and the earth itself to obtain these luxuries and to produce them by pillaging the earth. And finally, to justify all this, a new worldview: the Transcendent worldview, in which the earth is merely an inanimate source of goods, and human life on it merely preparatory to an eternal life in a better place, all sanctioned by a god who looks and acts suspiciously similar to the patriarchal urban elite.
Viewed through the lens of our new knowledge, this change is utterly and deeply heartbreaking. It constitutes a complete and irredeemable loss, a tragic wrong turn in human history that cannot be righted.
How can we view this loss? First, we can be very proud that humanity had 10,000 years of contentment, fully realizing that we were at home on a blessed earth. This was indeed the high point of human history, the apex of our species' life on earth. These three decades of archaeological research has given us the gift of this knowledge.
Secondly, how do we react to this loss? Not surprisingly, our Meso-Neolithic ancestors fought the change and resisted it. As soon as the patriarchal urban elite compelled the villagers to give up their hunting-gathering-gardening and adopt full-time monoculture agriculture—to become peasants—revolts against the urban rulers quickly became common, and indeed have persisted throughout these 4,500 years of history in China. Consider this poem by the T'ang dynasty poet Tu Fu, describing a scene 2,800 years later:
Wagons rumble, horses whinny / Marching men, each with bow and arrows at the belt / Fathers and mothers, wives and children / Rush to bid them farewell / Until Xianyang bridge disappears in the dust / Stumbling and clutching at their beloved ones' sleeves / They bar the way in tears / The sound of wailing rises into the clouds.
A bystander on the roadside questions a soldier / The soldier curtly replies, "Another conscription / Some of us at fifteen went north to guard the river / Reaching forty, sent west to work the farms / When we left the village elder bound our head-scarves / White-haired we return, still on border duty / That same border where blood has flowed to fill a sea / And the Emperor's craving for territory is still unsatisfied."
Even though a local elder may question them / The humble soldiers dare not express resentment / Only look at the present winter / Still no relief for the soldiers / Local officials urgently pressing for taxes / Where are the taxes to come from? / We have learned that to have a son is bad luck / Better to have borne a daughter / Who can marry and live in a neighbor's home / While under the sod of distant lands our sons are buried unmarked.
--A Song of War Chariots
A short-list, tip-of the-iceberg recounting of such revolts by peasants in just the past 2000 years of the Common Era (CE) would include Red Eyebrow Revolt, the sorceress Mother Lu being labelled a "witch," 0017; Yellow Turbans 184-188; Five Pecks of Rice 190; Heaven and Earth (Triad Society) 1674 and 1840s; White Lotus Society 1796 to 1804; Taiping Rebellion 1850-1864; Nian Revolt 1853-1868; Muslim Revolts in the Southwest 1856-1873, and Northwest 1862-1873; New Teaching 1862; Righteous Fists (Boxers) 1898-1901; Chinese Communist Party 1921-1949. While all of these had peasant discontent as primary grounds for the revolt, many of them also involved religious groups (Islam in the west of China, Taoism in the eat and south) and secret society links.
This list only includes the major, large-scale revolts of the "recent" past. Without any doubt, unmentioned here are the unrecorded hundreds of thousands of spontaneous local uprisings, uncoordinated revolts promptly snuffed out by the murders of the peasants involved by local tax-collector or magistrate's thugs before they could swell to major insurrection events.
While antagonism between patriarchal rulers in urban areas and the common folk whose lives they control began in China in about 2,000 BCE, the basic dynamic of the situation has become universal among human societies East and West up to the present. In virtually every society, it is the luxury-loving rich centered in large cities who comprise the leaders (or control the leaders) of our modern societies. And it is the common folk who provide the labor, skill, or otherwise create all the wealth involved. The terms "immanent" and "transcendent" may be long absent from descriptions of human societies, but the basic dynamic remains the same.
Thus when my wife and I attended protest marches in the early months of 2025, we saw thousands upon thousands of common folk—of every age, race, color, and religion—shouting defiance at the top of their lungs against the controlling, manipulative actions of—yes—billionaires and dictators and the heads of vast transnational corporations. The more things change, the more they stay the same. The rich urban patriarchs are still facing revolts by the commoners. Plain, powerless folks ae still defiantly objecting to rich men impoverishing and manipulating their lives, whether called kings, dictators, heads of transnational corporations, or priests.
It is this continuing revolt of the commoners against the urban men who control their lives to make rich men richer that is the greatest legacy of our 10,000 years of Meso-Neolithic ancestors. When they were compelled to adopt full-time agriculture by the patriarchs—to become peasants—they were the first to revolt and say "no!" to luxury-loving urban elite. It is this magnificent act of defiance that is still playing out 4,000 years later. That is their gift to us moderns, and as we take it up, we must thank them. The revolts are not always successful; indeed, over the ages they are rarely successful in a long-lasting manner. Yet they are what we can do, what we must do. And we do it, with joy and thanks. Those of us privileged to live in America have a rich heritage of revolts; after all, America was born resisting a king. So we resist, joyfully. We must.
Note: The above blog is a summary of my book Forgotten World (2021). The book itself has many illustrations and examples of the archaeological discoveries leading to the discovery of the 10,000-year Meso-Neolithic civilization and the Immanent worldview it held, featuring its burials, grave goods, figurines, and art.
The details of the transition from this to the new Bronze Age "civilization", which differed in the West and in China, are examined in the book, as well as the bulwarks of that new age (about 4,000 years old and ongoing) and the multitudinous ways in which it carries out its destruction of rival humans and the earth. I also examine the remnants of the previous Immanently-based age that have, improbably though inspiringly, survived into our current age, including a dozen "Avatars of the Immanent" that have appeared in the past century and a half. Feel free to order Forgotten World; I prefer you do so through Barnes and Noble (online ordering and delivery available) or an independent bookshop. However you do so, thanks, and enjoy! rjb