I read recently (New Yorker, maybe) that states appeared not at the advent of agriculture, as has been posited for a long time, but at the advent of cultivation of cereals. All the places where nation states (or city states) formed had as primary crops corn, rice, oats, barley, and/or wheat, and all the agricultural societies that grew tubers, e.g., just kept on getting wiped out by the hill people. The way in which cereals grow are key to why this happened. First, they grow above ground (so they can't be easily hidden), second they only get harvested once per season (or at least at regular, defined intervals--so they can be counted), and third, they are storable for long periods (so they can be commodified). This allowed for the innovation of taxation, which was never before possible. Want to raise that army to kill the hill people? Well, cough up the wheat to feed them. So in a sense, the "format war" was between cereals and tubers (even though it was probably less choice and more geography that dictated the choice of crop).
Interesting. Reza Aslan would likely argue that "state" is a keenly Western idea and Diamond would likely argue that by that definition, New Guinea has yet to evolve states but it's a semantic beef. Kaplan would argue that the raider/farmer dichotomy is cyclical with society progressing from one to the other. Wikipedia tells me wheat has been cultivated since 9500 bc but Sumer didn't arise for another 5000 years. My 9th grade history teacher (who was basically cribbing Durant the entire time) emphasized that the Nile flooded predictably while the Tigris and Euphrates were wildly unpredictable; as a consequence the culture and civilization of Egypt was nerfed out with a gentle underworld and benevolent gods while the culture and civilization of Sumer was all about cleanly dispatching your dead so they don't come back to haunt your ass and destroy your culture. I guess they both managed to figure out bread and beer.
Found it. Worth a read: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/09/18/the-case-against-civilization“History records no cassava states, no sago, yam, taro, plantain, breadfruit or sweet potato states,” he writes. What was so special about grains? The answer will make sense to anyone who has ever filled out a Form 1040: grain, unlike other crops, is easy to tax. Some crops (potatoes, sweet potatoes, cassava) are buried and so can be hidden from the tax collector, and, even if discovered, they must be dug up individually and laboriously. Other crops (notably, legumes) ripen at different intervals, or yield harvests throughout a growing season rather than along a fixed trajectory of unripe to ripe—in other words, the taxman can’t come once and get his proper due. Only grains are, in Scott’s words, “visible, divisible, assessable, storable, transportable, and ‘rationable.’ ” Other crops have some of these advantages, but only cereal grains have them all, and so grain became “the main food starch, the unit of taxation in kind, and the basis for a hegemonic agrarian calendar.” The taxman can come, assess the fields, set a level of tax, then come back and make sure he’s got his share of the harvest.
Ahhh, the noble savage. Pretty sure this line of thinking started with Lorenz. The basic idea is that we were all so much happier when we were barely-sapient hunter-gatherers with a lifespan of 28. The downside is that we're competitive breeders and once we'd figured out how to get all the calories we needed for idle time, the stuff we filled our idle time with was stuff that increased our social standing. From that point civilization is inevitable. It's equally possible that it took 5000 years to evolve the social structures necessary to irrigate.The big news to emerge from recent archeological research concerns the time lag between “sedentism,” or living in settled communities, and the adoption of agriculture. Previous scholarship held that the invention of agriculture made sedentism possible. The evidence shows that this isn’t true: there’s an enormous gap—four thousand years—separating the “two key domestications,” of animals and cereals, from the first agrarian economies based on them. Our ancestors evidently took a good, hard look at the possibility of agriculture before deciding to adopt this new way of life.
I don't personally even like camping, so you don't have to convince me that the noble savage myth is a bunch-o-bullshit. Hell, even my cats chose the warmest, softest parts of the house to lounge in. The interesting part to me is the invention of systematized taxation, which was a huge innovation in the history of mankind. Obviously, without taxes, there's no such thing as the state, since it needs finds to be self-sustaining. The only other way to get them is to steal them from the vanquished, but even that requires startup capital. That fact base is totally independent of whether you think it's a good idea or not, and since this guy is famous from writing about how central planning is literally the devil, I suppose he has an ax to grind.
Graeber, whose axe lives in the same toolshed, would point out that "taxation" was collective within the gift economy and certainly wouldn't have been limited to agriculture. The preponderance of slaves in Sumerian illustrations would suggest that the ingroup, which knew agriculture, expressed their cultural domination through assimilation on their terms. No tax necessary. If your father's father was friends with my father's father I know you're good for the two cows you owe me and if not we've got a mechanism. If you're that tribe we just crushed on the other side of the river you'll be digging furrows for your porridge.