TECHNOLOGY CHANGES EVERYTHING

s climate warmed at the end of the last ice age, and as humans hunted out the large Pleistocene animals whose meat had sustained them, a new way of life was forced upon those who inhabited the Middle East some 10,000 years ago. To stay alive through ever-more-frequent “starving times” people had begun gathering and eating the tiny seeds of certain grasses. They quickly learned that new plants would grow where such seeds had fallen. This was the dawn of a revolutionary food technology—agriculture—whose rapid development permitted a steadily growing population. Cities, the arithmetic of taxation, written