Settled monument-building may have preceded and driven the adoption of agriculture
Evidence
All of this is clearly at odds with the widely held view that human beings’ transition from small bands of seminomadic hunter-gatherers to larger groups of permanent town dwellers resulted from the advent of agriculture. As Schmidt suspects, it may well have been the reverse. Living in and around monuments constructed for ritual and religious purposes may have encouraged people to learn to farm, which would not have occurred as readily if they continued to maintain a more nomadic lifestyle. — Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, The Worm at the Core, 323