Finally, if a particular group of foragers should happen to possess any such features in common with farmers, the dominant narrative demands that these can only be ‘incipient’, ‘emergent’ or ‘deviant’ in nature, so that the destiny of foragers is either to ‘evolve’ into farmers, or eventually to wither and die. It will by now be increasingly obvious to any reader that almost nothing about this established narrative matches the available evidence. In the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East, long regarded as the cradle of the ‘Agricultural Revolution’, there was in fact no ‘switch’ from
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