I thank you for your comment. You seem to know a lot about the subject. You mistake me, though, for subscribing to Diamond's entire narrative, whereas the article is narrowly focused on the question of why the early kingdoms and civilizations doubled down instead of returning to the nomadic lifestyle. I use Diamond only to set up that mystery with his correctives against the progressive view that sedentary city life was always a vast improvement on the nomadic life in the wild. That's all that's at issue here for me.

You say only two diseases could have jumped from animals to humans through domestication. But what of Diamond's point that living indoors in large numbers would have helped spread all diseases?

I link to Çatalhöyük in the article when I point out that there were transitional, egalitarian settlements with hybrid values.

Indeed, it's "difficult to maintain" the thesis of deliberate prehistoric fraud. What I'm doing is adding that factor to the list of the complex factors that would have to be responsible for so broad a shift. I'm sure you're right that the rise social hierarchies had various causes. One of them, I suspect, under the circumstances that Diamond supplies in his article, was that the managers that emerged secured their privileges by exploiting the rabble's psychological weaknesses, spreading a polytheistic religious ideology that rationalized social structure.

The con was patriarchal theocracy, and the con was needed to close the door on a possible return to the nomadic, egalitarian lifestyle.

So I wonder whether you disagree specifically with Diamond's point that sedentary societies weren't always overwhelming improvements on the longstanding nomadic lifestyle. Assuming that point is correct, don't you think self-serving religion played some role in smoothing things over for the masses, and in rationalizing the trap they'd entered that benefited the royals much more than the slaves and peasants?