[AlotOfReading]

Yes, which is why there's a whole network of independent lines of evidence that inform modern consensus. Our picture of the neolithic, while still incomplete, is complete enough that most of the speculation in this thread is pretty unlikely.

[lumost]

I think the pace of new discoveries in that time period over the last 10 years brings into question how accurate our consensus is. The consensus view is the best informed by current evidence, however we lack sufficient evidence to really pin down what humans were doing in most of the world. Given this lack of evidence, our default assumption is that they were doing what they had done before... which was probably living in nomadic tribes ... until suddenly Mesopotamia/Egypt.

[AlotOfReading]

So for context, I used to work on this professionally. I still keep up with the literature to a reasonable degree.

The major new tool we have is ancient DNA and the results we've gotten from it broadly rule out most of the 'expected' ways we'd see an advanced, ancient society.

As for that default, most archaeologists would not agree with what you've described. Everyone can point to cultures like the natufians as pre-YD societies that weren't fully nomadic and you can trace that stuff to through the Holocene and later 'civilizations' like Egypt and mesopotamia. Most archaeologists are also open to the idea that there was a tremendous amount of social and political diversity in the late pleistocene that isn't fully apparent in the material record, but this is more of a widespread hunch that doesn't yet have enough evidence to be called consensus.

[hnfong]

These days when academics (regardless whether it's public health or archeology) talk about evidence, I tend to read "evidence" as "what we already know", and the whole narrative ends up being "we know what we already know, and we reject what we don't already know".

I mean, there's no way to un-see this way of reading "evidence" after realizing how much humanity has yet to learn, yet there's a class of people who's confident that they're really knowledgable about stuff.