ABSTRACT
What is the contemporary relevance of a transformation of the human cultural niche that took place in remote prehistory. We have seen how the ENT involved the formation of super-communities of permanently co-resident communities which greatly enhanced the scale and tempo of cultural–technical innovation – what used to be called progress. The new permanent settlements represent population aggregation, and aggregation is a term frequently used in urban studies and settlement scaling theory. I suggest that the super-linear scaling dynamics that are found in urban contexts can be seen to apply in the Neolithic world. From that, it follows that our modern urban world is the direct descendent of the first permanently aggregated societies, with their accelerated scale and tempo of cultural cumulation. In that sense, it is sensible to set the beginning of the Neolithic as the start of the Anthropocene, the period within which human societies have played a central role in changing Earth’s atmosphere, oceans, and ecology and climate. We know that we face the necessity of many and urgent changes in the ways that Earth’s resources are exploited, but we should also realise that our social and economic ways of living are deeply and culturally rooted in the ENT. Changing a 10,000 year-old way of life that is dependent on expansion and growth – demographic, economic, technical, whether for well-being or profit – is the challenge we face.
