there are not only up to nine
independent trajectories of intensification that did culminate in agriculture,
but also many other ones that didn’t quite (or that hadn’t yet at the time
thateuropean conquest aborted them). Areas of the world where hunter–
gatherers in the Holocene developed increased population densities,
complex material culture, in some cases pottery, and (some
anthropologists argue) sedentary living and ranked societies with chiefs
included Mesolithic Europe, Japan and maritime Far East Asia, the North
American high Arctic, the Pacific coast of northwest North America, interior
California’s oak woodlands, the California Channel Islands, the Calusa of
Florida, the coast of Ecuador, and the Murray–Darling Basin of southeast
Australia