With the emergence of cultivation and domesticated species of plants, a new chapter in cultural development opens. However, this chapter does not read, as the traditional textbooks would have it, with agriculture as the major watershed in cultural evolution. The major watershed occurred with the appearance of complex (transegalitarian) hunter/gatherers. Virtually all of the cultural innovations traditionally attributed to Neolithic cultures actually first appeared before agriculture or domestication arrived on the scene. Pottery, ground stone tools, sedentism, storage, population densities that were often greater than one person per square kilometer (with the worldwide average density for swidden horticulture of 5.6 people/square kilometer; Watters 1960), large villages with permanent architecture, heterarchical organization, monumental architecture, burial mounds, competitive feasting, all of the most common aggrandizer strategies, cemeteries, socioeconomic inequalities, secret societies, ancestor worship, prestige items, and even the use of native metals are often still considered to be hallmarks of the Neolithic, but all occurred first in complex hunter/gatherer societies.

The main point is that aside from the use of domesticated species (often as very minor components of subsistence), there are no fundamental differences between most complex hunter/gatherers and horticulturalists, despite what some archaeologists and ethnographers may imagine (e.g., Whittle 1994, 1996). A number of researchers have commented on this basic similarity (Testart 1982; Price and Brown 1985; Shnirelman 1992; Arnold 1996; Roscoe 2002), but the observation seems to have gone largely unnoticed by many archaeologists.