An account of all the new & surprising evidence now available for the beginnings of the earliest civilizations that contradict the standard narrative Why did humans abandon hunting & gathering for sedentary communities dependent on livestock & cereal grains & governed by precursors of today's states? Most people believe that plant & animal domestication allowed humans finally to settle down & form agricultural villages towns & states which made possible civilization law public order & a presumably secure way of living But archaeological & historical evidence challenges this narrative The first agrarian states says James C Scott were born of accumulations of domestications first fire then plants livestock subjects of the state captives & finally women in the patriarchal family-all of which can be viewed as a way of gaining control over reproduction Scott explores why we avoided sedentism & plow agriculture the advantages of mobile subsistence the unforeseeable disease epidemics arising from crowding plants animals & grain & why all early states are based on millets & cereal grains & unfree labor He also discusses the "barbarians" who long evaded state control as a way of understanding continuing tension between states & nonsubject peoples