Göbekli Tepe provides dramatic evidence against this narrative.

The builders of the site had pottery.

They did not have a mature agricultural economy.

They were, by the conventional designation, hunter-gatherers.

And they built an extraordinary monumental landscape of symbolic architecture that required sustained collective effort, sophisticated craft skill, and some form of social organization capable of coordinating the work of many people toward shared goals.

This does not mean that the conditions of subsistence were irrelevant to human social development — they clearly matter enormously in shaping the range of social possibilities available to a community.

It means that the specific capacity for social complexity, symbolic culture, and collective achievement was not created by agriculture.