Agriculture, in turn, did not mean the inception of private property, nor did it mark an irreversible step towards inequality. In fact, many of the first farming communities were relatively free of ranks and hierarchies. And far from setting class differences in stone, a surprising number of the world’s earliest cities were organized on robustly eg

I’m trying to emphasize the presence of the past, how the dead live in us. Research by Alberto Alesina, Paola Giuliano, and Nathan Nunn found that people who are descended from those who practiced plow-heavy agriculture tend to live in cultures that have strongly defined gender roles, because it was mostly men who drove the plow. On the other hand,

agriculture was a kind of invention, one that occurred independently in several locations across the inhabited world. It involved a process of learning how to plant selectively the seeds of certain wild plant species, mainly grasses, to enable humanity to cultivate crops rather than simply to gather the natural outputs of these plants.

The culprits were a handful of plant species, including wheat, rice and potatoes. These plants domesticated Homo sapiens, rather than vice versa.