Storage facilities that would have required management and allocation decisions.

Architectural investments in larger, more permanent structures.

Long-distance exchange networks requiring relationships of trust and obligation.

The construction of major communal monuments requiring organized collective labor.

All of these point toward social structures more complex than the simplest egalitarian models would suggest.

Whether those structures involved hereditary leaders, recognized shamans or ritual specialists, councils of elders, or some other form of decision-making authority cannot be determined from the material evidence alone.

The comparative ethnographic record of societies at similar scales and subsistence strategies provides some range of possibilities, but cannot identify which specific form applied to the PPN communities of Upper Mesopotamia.