This thread is slowly blowing my mind!
What you say about Lapp-style herdsmen shows how central pastoralism is to these questions. There is no abrupt transition from hunter-gatherer to farmer surely - it all goes through the "half-way house" of pastoralism. Perhaps the pastoralist "revolution" is what began to give us the time to think.
The argument that agriculture represents our first wrestling of control over our lives from "the Mother's apron-strings" makes me uncomfortable. This attaining of control was surely a long process that began not with pastoralism, even, but the discovery of fire, or perhaps the making of the first tool (like in 2001: A Space Oddyssey),
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