The Oldest Settlements Were Built by a Culture Nobody Expected

This is clickbait. The settlements are only 8000 years old. That's younger than Jericho or Damascus.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jericho#History_and_archaeolog...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damascus#History

Obligatory pitch for The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity By: David Graeber, David Wengrow

which is a whole book about the challenging of the "Necessity of Cities" and "Agriculture Ends the Good Life" memes, as well as a few others that go mostly unchallenged in history books.

    A trailblazing account of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution—from the development of agriculture and cities to the emergence of "the state", political violence, and social inequality—revealing new possibilities for human emancipation