Abstract
Much of the literature on the role played by environment in complex society development focuses on temporal correspondence between climate change and human social change. Many such studies fall into a series of traps: the unwarranted assumption that correlation equals causation; failure to evaluate the statistical significance of the association; simplistic characterization of climate change's human impact or of the nature of human social change itself; and focusing on a spatial scale too large to intersect with the human decision-making processes where social change begins. Here we compare decisions made about buffering agricultural risk by Neolithic farmers in two regions of northern China. Hongshan farmers in the Western Liao Valley chose to cope with agricultural risk at the individual household level and lived in scattered farmsteads and dispersed villages, while Yangshao farmers in the Central Plains chose cooperation and interdependence between households living in large compact villages. These decisions were clearly rooted in the particular environmental conditions of the two regions and had far-reaching and unanticipated consequences for the two long-term trajectories of complex society development. The forces that shaped the trajectories of the Western Liao and the Central Plains differently fit a pattern that is global in scope. Examining the decisions made by Neolithic farmers in response to an essentially static feature of their environments contributes more to our understanding of the dynamics of long-term human social change (and the environment's role in it) than attempting to correlate social changes to particular climate changes.