‘How to deal with others’, when, due to sedentism, ‘others’ had become more numerous and could no longer be chosen or changed at will, was, I have suggested, one of the most fundamental problems facing Neolithic societies. Obviously, the first farmers in Greece were not the first folk anywhere to face this problem. Several solutions had already been implemented, in particular in the Near East during the several millennia that witnessed the development of sedentary life.

Nevertheless, our first farmers in Greece may have had, or wanted, to implement new solutions and develop new mechanisms of social regulation. After a farming economy was introduced in continental Greece, the first villagers created, in the most favourable areas, a dense network of closely spaced settlements that had little or no equivalent in the Near East. They had to experiment with sedentary life in small or medium-sized, but densely distributed, communities. Compared with life in some of the largest PPNB or Early Pottery Neolithic agglomerations of the Near East, such as those that reached 12 hectares of densely packed houses at Abu Hureyra or Çatal Hüyük, this necessarily entailed a different socioeconomic organization.

The size of the largest Near Eastern prehistoric agglomerations precludes, according to decision-making theories (Johnson G. 1978, 1982; Reynolds 1984), an egalitarian organization, or a purely horizontal mode of integration. Successive levels of decision would have been necessary in communities grouping hundreds, perhaps thousands of people.