The Birth of Horticultural Societies

For most of the history of our species, a history that is lost to the sands of time, Homo sapiens were hunter-gatherers. We spent most of our waking hours acquiring food. This meant gathering berries, harvesting local plant life, and hunting live animals for their meat. Hunter-gatherer societies had to be

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more importantly, the small food and wealth surplus that was produced was captured by political and religious elites; siphoned off for their benefit.

The scale of this expropriation was vast. According to some estimates, by 1300, church clerics owned one-third of all agricultural land in Europe. The wealth generated by the peasants was directed into

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