State societies did not inevitably arise from cultivation and tended to dissolve, as people found living with a formal state preferable:
Scott sees early states as liable to undermine the conditions for their own existence. Self-inflicted causes of this vulnerability included "climate change, resource depletion, disease, warfare, and migration to areas of greater abundance."[10] For instance, a state might log areas upstream so that timber could float down to the state center, but this could lead to flooding in the spring. The very first state-builders knew no prior examples that would have warned against such problems. Regardless of the causes, Scott propounds that the archaeological evidence suggests that early human communities were constantly collapsing, dispersing, coming back together and collapsing again. Scott believes that academics have viewed state collapse negatively due to the loss of cultural complexity, but in fact he thinks such collapse may have advantaged the majority of people involved.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_the_Grain:_A_Deep_History_of_the_Earliest_States
= new reply since forum marked as read