Reconciling Nature and Culture After "Naissance des Divinités, Naissance de l’Agriculture"

In Naissance des divinités, Naissance de l’agriculture, Jacques Cauvin proposes that agriculture could not have begun without a prior sudden mental transformation, and that the Near East case is exceptional. His emphasis on the primacy of ideas leads him to devalue the influence that foragers have on their environment, and to erroneously assume that agriculture represented a “control” over nature that was qualitatively new. It is clear that ancient people had a deep understanding of their physical, biotic, and sociocultural environments, and societies that succeeded worked within the constraints imposed by all those domains.