How would we know whether the cases that Graeber and Wengrow explore are sufficient to falsify the evolutionists’ claims?

In principle, sociocultural evolutionists should therefore be just as interested in the scaling down of societies as in their scaling up.

When monkeys or other animals multiply, however, they continue to live in troops of roughly the same size. There are no simian cities. We humans are unique in our ability to scale up our permanent settlements. So far as we know, there were no year-round, sedentary communities with even 1,000 residents before Çatalhöyük, around 7000 BCE; none above 10,000 residents before Uruk, Susa, Tell Hamoukar, and Tell Brak in the Near East and Majdanetske, Taljanki, Dobrovodi, and Nebelivka in Ukraine, all roughly around 3500 BCE; none above 100,000 before Nineveh, around 700 BCE; none above one million before Rome, around 50 BCE; and none above 10 million before New York, London, and other early 20th-century supercities.21 Although we have continued to evolve biologically since 7000 BCE, we are still more or less the same animals as we were then. What has evolved out of all recognition is our institutions, giving us the organizational tools for cooperation on much larger scales; and evolutionary anthropologists have consistently concluded that, through most of history, top-down hierarchy has been what made this possible.22

Across the last 20 years, evolutionists have adopted more sophisticated frameworks (such as niche construction theory) to accommodate the new findings, and Stephen Shennan’s superb book First Farmers of Europe provides a thorough and convincing evolutionary account of the origins and expansion of agriculture.15

Since the 2000s, archaeologists and paleobotanists have moved away from three older theories about the origins of agriculture—first, that population growth after the end of the Ice Age (around 9650 BCE) drove experiments with gardening and herding that led to the domestication of plants and animals in the Near East; second, that domestication happened in a few core regions of the Near East and then spread steadily outward; and third, that farming inexorably drove processes of sedentism, rising labor inputs, and increasing inequality. Instead, most experts now suggest that the relationship between population and domestication was complicated and variable; that experiments with cultivating plants went on in multiple locations, particularly wetlands; that domesticated plants caught on extremely slowly, needing 3,000 years (ca. 9500–6500 BCE) to go from under 20% of assemblages to over 80%; that the drift toward domesticated resources was regularly reversed; that rather than causing sedentism, domestication was often its consequence; that sedentism and experiments with plant cultivation began as early as 21,000 BCE, at the coldest point in the last Ice Age; and that there is little sign of institutionalized inequality in the Near East before about 5500 BCE.14

Allen Johnson and Timothy Earle’s widely read book The Evolution of Human Societies, which uses the Great Basin Shoshone of a century ago as one of its key case studies. Like the Cheyenne, the Shoshone spent most of the year in unranked, family-sized groups, but some of them periodically granted “rabbit bosses” and “antelope shamans” far-reaching powers to coordinate large-scale hunting and trapping.

The literature is enormous; I draw particularly on Boyd and Richerson 2005 and Messoudi 2011, and Trigger’s (1998) account of the field’s intellectual history.

In what follows, I take evolutionists to be scholars who see some conceptual continuity between human history and biological evolution, who consider sociocultural evolution to be governed by identifiable mechanisms functioning somewhat like natural selection, who see these mechanisms as involving adaptation to the environment, who believe that the mechanisms operate on all societies regardless of time and space, and—usually, but not always—who recognize stages of social and cultural evolution, from egalitarian foraging bands through hierarchical agricultural empires and pastoral tribes, to modern fossil-fuel-based nation-states.