alt Hacker NewsI don’t think there’s a good basis for your claim. The earliest agricultural cultures all practiced flood retreat agriculture in alluvial plains.
If you look at the Americas you also only see intensive agriculture in coercive top down city states or small empires. Outside of that you see opportunistic plantings and forest agronomy mixed with foraging and hunting. Or in coastal regions you see marginal planting supplementing diets focused on fishing.
Settled agriculture was not spreading very frequently by choice. Why would anyone choose subsistence grain agriculture when literally anything else was available. On an individual level it’s strictly worse than foraging and hunting across almost all measures you’d care about.
> Why would anyone choose subsistence grain agriculture when literally anything else was available.
There was nothing else available. If you were born in an agricultural settlement, that was probably the only lifestyle you knew. Even if you knew other ways to sustain yourself, all land was already taken. Settled regions were too densely populated, and the lands beyond them were claimed by indigenous peoples. If you wanted to migrate there, the best option was to go in sufficient numbers and start a new defensible settlement.
Middle-Eastern farmers started migrating into Europe ~9k years ago, and they reached the British Isles and Scandinavia ~6k years ago. The population that reached the British Isles was ~80% Middle-Eastern and 20% Indigenous European by ancestry.