Agriculture is crucial for anything like an Industrial civilization, and developments in agriculture closely parallel societal development. The density of natural pulse and fruit cultivation is insufficient to support a sedentary population, and hunting cannot provide sufficient protein and animal fat to support city-level population densities in temperate climes with long non-growing winter seasons. You have to have high calorie, readily digested domestic pulses, and regular sources of protein (likely in the form of domestic animals) to support high density populations. Such domesticated species will be weaker, in competitive terms, than the wild species they came from, making them more dependent and easier to harvest for their husbanders.
Early dynastic civilizations based upon simple cultivation of bred or crudely hybridized pulses and limited animal husbandry required masses of slave labor for agriculture and conscription for the occasional war (all the better to cull your burgonening population), with a professional warrior caste to keep it in line and an administrative/executive body at the top. These tended to be highly authoritarian, but not very robust, and when they collapsed (usually via decay from within) their distintegration was almost complete.
Later feudal societies–from Greece onward in the West–used more advanced animal husbandry methods to obtain higher yields, and more localized control based on fealty (or sometimes abayment of such) to higher levels of authority, as typically seen in Medieval Europe. Although such loyalties were unstable, they tended to an overall greater continuity; hence the continuance of the Holy Roman Empire (which is three lies for the price of one) long after the Roman Empire ceased to exist. (The Roman Empire was, of course, preceded by the Republic of Rome, which was suprisingly progressive in its politics, which were a progression of Athenian liberalism, but seemingly well ahead of its time.)
Along with feudalism in various forms came trade, and as trade increased (allowing you to specialize in a few crops and diversify both diet and nonperishable goods) so did exchange of cultural and technical information, which rapidly increased literacy and capability. This is really the first step in getting beyond merely bigger and more complex tribes. After that, of course, came industrialism and the mass production of goods, and a progressively larger mercantile and manufacturing class in which wealth and political power was more evenly distributed. Industrialism didn’t exclusively occur in Europe, of course, but owing to many factors (including the inability for one central authority to maintain overall control) it took root and continued to develop unabated, whereas in China and India it was stunted by authoritarian controls, and in the Middle East and North Africa by (in part) a lack of natural resources. Western Industrialization lead to a large class of literate people who has sufficient leisure to become politically, culturally, and technically educated, which fed back into greater innovations in the natural sciences, manufacturing sciences, arts, and philosophy (practical and otherwise).
This is all highly streamlined, of course, and it’s not saying that some kind of non-Industrial society based on advanced agriculture and animal husbandry couldn’t exist, but it’s hard to imagine what it would be like; it almost certainly wouldn’t be recognizable in terms of what we would regard as an advanced civilization based upon our own experience. It would have to have lower population densities and a much lowered dependence upon “hard” (manufactured) technology as well as a vastly different set of political philosophies (which I think would require a greater degree of natural cooperativeness than seen in modern human civilizations) but still retain high rates of cultural and technical literacy. It’s an interesting thought experiment, but there’s no sign or credible hypothesis that such a society did or could exist.
Stranger