Question

Passage A
For decades, the standard anthropological model has held that the agricultural revolution was a reluctant adaptation to environmental pressures. According to this view, as the last Ice Age ended, changing climates and growing populations forced human societies to abandon nomadic foraging in favor of cultivating predictable food sources. A critical, albeit unintended, consequence of this shift was the emergence of social stratification. The cultivation of crops inherently generated caloric surpluses, which required centralized storage and distribution mechanisms. Consequently, a managerial class arose to oversee these resources, gradually consolidating power and transforming formerly egalitarian bands into rigidly hierarchical societies. In this materialist framework, social complexity is strictly a byproduct of the economic realities of farming.

Passage B
Recent archaeological discoveries have fundamentally challenged the traditional chronology of human development, suggesting instead that complex social and religious structures predated the domestication of plants. The excavation of monumental ritual sites constructed entirely by hunter-gatherers indicates that pre-agricultural societies were already capable of organizing massive, coordinated labor projects. To sustain the thousands of workers gathered at these sacred sites, vast quantities of wild food had to be gathered and processed. It is increasingly likely that the intensive cultivation of crops was not a desperate response to starvation, but rather a deliberate technological innovation driven by the need to feed the laborers building these monuments. Therefore, the desire for complex social congregation was the catalyst for agriculture, rather than the other way around.

Based on the arguments presented in both texts, which of the following best describes how the author of Passage B would most likely characterize the claim in Passage A that social stratification was an "unintended consequence" of agriculture?