• Agriculture requires sedentism, but sedentism more likely lead to agriculture than the other way around.
• Monumental stone architecture long predates cities, from Göbekli Tepe, to Nevali Çori, to the orthostats of Nabta Playa and Stonehenge, to the megalithic stone temples of Malta, to the barrows and cairns of prehistoric Europe.
• Rather than a separate “professional” bureaucracy, or the speculative existence of social “classes,” such relationships may have emerged out of existing social structures.
• Cities were centers of long-distance trade between cultures, but internally were run by debt/credit relationships and/or centralized redistribution networks, and not by “free and open markets” or money exchanges.
• Cities were often autonomous and “cut off” from the surrounding countryside, both politically and economically.

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