WHY DIDN’T CIVILIZATION COME TO ALL FOOD-PRODUCERS?
Once you have food-production, even at the well-advanced level of the village-farming community, what else has to happen before you get civilization? Many men have asked this question and have failed to give a full and satisfactory answer. There is probably no one answer. I shall give you my own idea about how civilization may have come about in the Near East alone. Remember, it is only a guess—a putting together of hunches from incomplete evidence. It is not meant to explain how civilization began in any of the other areas—China, southeast Asia, the Americas—where other early experiments in civilization went on. The details in those areas are quite different. Whether certain general principles hold, for the appearance of any early civilization, is still an open and very interesting question.