I don't remember the details of their arguments, but Graeber and Wengrow think this is a misleading image. IIRC one of their main thrusts was that over long periods of history, groups of humans have adopted and abandoned stationary agriculture at will, as conditions indicate.
I suppose that makes us as domesticated as e.g. lions or chimpanzees, which have been known to e.g. share food with humans ("work for them") in the wild but it's not their reason for existence.
I lent out my copy of the Dawn of Everything so I can't get exact quotes or pages but this reminded me of a point in the book (which I highly recommend) which I'll attempt to summarize:
Domestication of plants was "easy" when tested in a controlled setting selecting seeds carefully at a university. Estimated that wheat in the agricultural "revolution" (a much scoffed about term in the book) could have been domesticated in 200 years if purposeful. Instead agriculture took something like 3000 years to become dominant versus mixed food sources (mostly gathering, fishing and hunting, with some low-effort planting on riverbanks).
And yes to your point, the idea that there is some sort of progression in human societies is contradicted by the recent decades of evidence in archeology -- every arrangement you can imagine seems to have been tried (stationary+hunter/gather, nomadic farmer, alternating back and forth, shifts toward farming for hundreds of years and then back to fishing for thousands). Humans time on the earth has been much longer than our recorded history, with more variety and less boring than we usually assume.
Anyway I hope that inspires someone to pick up the book, it really is a good read.
thanks for sharing, I will check out that book for sure!
>IIRC one of their main thrusts was that over long periods of history, groups of humans have adopted and abandoned stationary agriculture at will, as conditions indicate.
In general they still totally depend on it.
So this would be like saying dogs aren't domesticated, because some left their owners or bit them, or there are groups of stray dogs here and there.
What makes you say they still totally depended on it? I can easily imagine groups of humans having a period of settled agriculture for convenience rather than necessity.