Transitional Changes from a Mobile Hunter-Gatherer to a Sedentary Neolithic Agrarian System.

Abstract

The increasingly permanent, large-scale communities that developed in SW Asia in the early Neolithic, and that have been the norm in many societies ever since, mark a significant break with the highly mobile, fission-fusion forms of social organisation shared by all earlier human and indeed other primate forebears. While economic, ecological and cultural changes were clearly an important part of the transition, the social changes that accompanied them have received considerably less attention, despite the fact that they may have been critical elements of the transition. Network methods specifically designed for visualising and analysing changes in social structure thus offer enormous potential for examining the momentous social changes that occurred at this time.