[ch4s3]

Again, you don't see a major decline in population in many cases based on the archeology. Insofar as we can tell people would spread out a bit away from the cities. In the fertile crescent early city states attempted to corral people in to controlled zones of production. Absent coercion, people didn't die they just moved.

[jltsiren]

If you are basing your claims on Against the Grain, Scott focuses on early centralized states, which emerged thousands of years after agriculture and towns.

Such states were by definition exceptional. Most of them were in regions, where rainfall alone was insufficient, and agriculture dependend on irrigation. Such a dependence on centralized infrastructure favored state formation, but it also made the communities fragile. Local population collapses were common everywhere, but the fragility made them worse. When the irrigation infrastructure failed, harvests failed, the town failed, and the survivors dispersed.

But agriculture spread long before states. Where the local conditions were favorable, agricultural communities naturally had a surplus of labor. If there was unclaimed land available, landless men and women would occasionally split from the community and start a new one. That was the primary mechanism of the spread of agriculture.

[ch4s3]

I don’t think there’s a good basis for your claim. The earliest agricultural cultures all practiced flood retreat agriculture in alluvial plains.

If you look at the Americas you also only see intensive agriculture in coercive top down city states or small empires. Outside of that you see opportunistic plantings and forest agronomy mixed with foraging and hunting. Or in coastal regions you see marginal planting supplementing diets focused on fishing.

Settled agriculture was not spreading very frequently by choice. Why would anyone choose subsistence grain agriculture when literally anything else was available. On an individual level it’s strictly worse than foraging and hunting across almost all measures you’d care about.

[jltsiren]

> Why would anyone choose subsistence grain agriculture when literally anything else was available.

There was nothing else available. If you were born in an agricultural settlement, that was probably the only lifestyle you knew. Even if you knew other ways to sustain yourself, all land was already taken. Settled regions were too densely populated, and the lands beyond them were claimed by indigenous peoples. If you wanted to migrate there, the best option was to go in sufficient numbers and start a new defensible settlement.

Middle-Eastern farmers started migrating into Europe ~9k years ago, and they reached the British Isles and Scandinavia ~6k years ago. The population that reached the British Isles was ~80% Middle-Eastern and 20% Indigenous European by ancestry.

[ch4s3]

> If you were born in an agricultural settlement, that was probably the only lifestyle you knew

All of these societies would have had headers and hunting/foraging people on their periphery who they traded with. People regularly fucked off to go join those groups. This is well attested to in written records.

[jltsiren]

There is a difference between what anyone can do and what everyone can do at the same time. Some people could always choose alternative life paths, but that option was not available for the majority.