The anthropological record on state formation is more complex than it’s made out to be. There wasn’t a linear progression from hunter-gatherers to agriculture, to cities and the institution of government. Rather, different combinations of each have appeared throughout history.

Universal historical narratives are reductionist, and usually exist in service to universal meta-narratives like the liberal myth of progress, instead of the other way around, foregoing complexity for ideological confirmation and easy to digest simplicity.

Archeological evidence reveals distinct societies and entire periods that throw the conventional narrative into question —egalitarian cities, hierarchical hunter-gatherers, societies that combined farming and foraging, and ones that switched between different modes of production.

According to James C. Scott, agriculture arose ~12000 year ago, and states arose ~6000 years ago. Although agriculture facilitated the rise of states by creating a sedentary population that could be taxed and controlled by the state, it doesn’t necessarily give rise to statism.

The first cities have been described by David Graeber as “robustly egalitarian,” such as those in Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley, but not without central government or municipal councils, so I treat these societies with some skepticism, and closer to minarchy than anarchy.

What I take away from this is that deterministic visions of anarchism are needlessly limiting and ahistorical, where it is seen as incompatible with things like complex technology and urban living. The field of possibility for anarchism is very much open.

The best essay I’ve read on this topic, and where I get much of this info is “How to change the course of human history“ by David Graeber and David Wengrow.

https://www.eurozine.com/change-course-human-history/

As an additional note, a certain level of technology and social complexity isn’t necessarily tied to the set of social relationships that happens to give rise to it. In other words, the social relations that can reproduce any given set of material conditions isn’t fixed.

This means that as technology changes, it can give rise to new possibilities that aren’t accounted for by history. For example, nobody could have predicted the capacity of the internet as a tool to circumvent state central and facilitate non-hierarchical social relations.