Everybody knows the story: People figure out farming, settle down, build cities, and civilization takes it from there. Scott, an anthropologist and political scientist at Yale who spent his life studying how regular people dodge governments, points out the timeline doesn’t work. Four thousand years pass between the first domesticated grain and the first real cities. People knew how to farm and mostly didn’t bother, because hunting and foraging fed them better and cost them less work. When states finally show up, they run on grain, and Scott thinks that’s the tell. Grain ripens on a schedule and stands up where you can see it, so a tax collector can count it and take a cut. Roots and tubers hide underground on nobody’s calendar. He goes further: The walls around the first cities may have been there as much to keep the workers in as to keep raiders out. The bones back him up. People in those early settlements were shorter, sicker, and worked harder than the foragers outside. Which is his last point. The barbarians out beyond the wall weren’t the losers of the story. A lot of the time they were eating better and answering to nobody.