There has always been in history some people who think in the Stone Age.
We did not domesticate wheat; wheat domesticated us.
We're addicted to this concept of civilization - we can't imagine living outside of it because we've had it for 10,000 years, all of what we call history. But according to archaeologists, humanity has been on this planet for millions of years in indigenous form.
Before the discovery of agriculture mankind was everywhere so divided, the size of each group being determined by the natural fertility of its locality.
The sustainability revolution will, hopefully, be the third major social and economic turning point in human history, following the Neolithic Revolution - moving from hunter-gathering to farming - and the Industrial Revolution
In Old Europe and Ancient Crete, women were respected for their roles in the discovery of agriculture and for inventing the arts of weaving and pottery making.
Around 4000BC, the Mesolithic, hunter-gatherer way of life here gave way to a more settled, farming existence. Those Neolithic people built wooden trackways across the salt marshes and reed beds.
There was an age, however, when the transition from savagery to civilization, with all its impressive outward manifestations in art and architecture, took place for the first time.
It is thought that the changeover from hunter to farmer was a slow, gradual process.
To the present writer a careful study of the facts now available seems to leave no doubt that civilization was born at the southeast corner of the Mediterranean.
In 10000 BC, all human beings were hunter-gatherers; by 1500 AD, 1 percent were hunter-gatherers. Less than .001 percent of people are hunter-gatherers today.
Many of the crises we see in the 21st century, I would argue, have their roots in the dawn of the Neolithic.
The discovery of agriculture was the first big step toward a civilized life.
Humans have lived for much, much longer than the approximately 10,000 years of settled agricultural civilization.
