Abstract
In the second of three chapters about the origins of human settlements in deep history, Bowen and Gleeson summarize new insights about human origins that are emerging from transdisciplinary research. One insight is that agriculture was begun by hunter-gatherer cultures, often thousands of years before permanent settlements. Another is that permanent settlements emerged independently in multiples places throughout the world through a process of convergent evolution during the early Holocene. The rise of a new settled mentality among ancient people extended the rudimentary sources of authority that existed within hunter-gatherer cultures and gave rise to a more complex settled lifeway that characterized hamlet and village cultures.
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Bowen, W.M., Gleeson, R.E. (2019). The Advent of Permanent Human Settlements. In: The Evolution of Human Settlements. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95034-1_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95034-1_4
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