the stories are all the same: foraging societies develop agriculture; the increased food supply leads to a population boom; the society grows and stratifies, with powerful clerics at the top and peasant cultivators at the bottom; massive public works ensue, along with intermittent social strife and war. If the MFAC hypothesis was true, early civilization in Peru was in one major respect strikingly unlike early civilization in Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, and China.

