[KirinDave]

Large-scale organized governments are a technology enabled by (at a minimum) writing and mathematics. It's not so much a golden age as a tautology to say that before those things existed these structures had less authority.

[Balgair]

That's possible, but this area of archeology is still undergoing a lot of change in understanding. Göbekli Tepe is a recent example of organization around (presumed) religious lines without writing or math (maybe)[0]. The farming systems of the Egyptians were largely preformed by illiterate peoples with some wirting and math in the priestly classes and aristocracy [1]. The Inca used a very different system of combined writing and math in their quipu [2]. The quipu are still nearly undecipherable today and may have been just memory aides and not a true writing system at all.

In the end, there are very good arguments against the necessity of writing and math for 'civilization' to occur. It's a very active field still.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Egyptian_agriculture

[2] https://www.ancient.eu/Quipu/

[KirinDave]

This is interesting, and you could also make the argument that without perfect records the early societies without writing might have been very widespread and we'd simply never know because no information was passed on to us.

Still, I think your examples support my sloppily presented idea more than they discredit them. So there is that.

[Balgair]

I'm sorry that my examples led you to believe that your idea was supported. I meant no such thing.

What I did mean to say was that your idea is possible among a multitude of other ideas and that the field is still very active in this area; we can neither confirm nor deny that math and writing are necessary for civilization at this time; more data is required.

[KirinDave]

This would have been a lot faster if you had just made that argument in the first place.

I'm still waiting for a single counter example. We might rephrase my argument to the more honest: "We don't have concrete examples of this type of social structure without writing and some form of mathematics."

While you're here to quibble, could you perhaps look at the parent thread? This whole notion that markets and authoritarian social structures are the human default is at least as concerning as my statement, surely. There are many forms of this argument being displayed here; some quite subtly. If my statement is merely unverifiable, the idea that markets represent an asymptotically optimal modeling of society is positively counterfactual and you may have stake in correcting that.