On this week of unleavened bread we got various pressers on cereal agriculture. It bounced around all week, and I've slated rather a lot of stuff for this week already - so the 15th should do for it.
The prior theory has been that stone-age agriculture allowed for surplus which could feed an idle class, which class then took command. The "controversy" is that, just because you got a village growing potatoes or yams, doesn't mean they'll ever enter the Neolithic. Look at New Guinea as of its discovery by Europeans. There will always be people who want to rule but their authority will be limited as long as the farmers can simply hide their crop of onions and radish under the ground. These root crops are also difficult to tally and to store.
Cereal crops, by contrast, are eminently storable (if you have cats), shippable, and countable. These can support the class of accountants. Meanwhile the farmers starved but, it seems, at least metallurgy came to restore some of their stature.
I honestly don't think this is controversial as such. It is just common-sense. It does however rely upon some gaps in the record, because the written record starts exactly here, and the record only puts numbers-to-pictographs as in (I think) Susa III. We do not know the names of the kings, nor of whatever eclipses or cosmic-ray bursts struck around that time. Something like that might be more useful to palaeoanthropolists.
UPDATE 4/20: Steve Sailer reviewing Oded Galor. Sailer observes the Andes as a potato culture so, shouldn't be imperial by this thesis, but Huari was. But I think the Huari had some grain-crop, which passed to the Inca.
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