To our ears, much of the rhetoric commonplace at the time, even among the most sophisticated scholars, sounds startlingly condescending: ‘A man who spends his whole life following animals just to kill them to eat,’ wrote the prehistorian Robert Braidwood in 1957, ‘or moving from one berry patch to another, is really living just like an animal himse

Farming enabled populations to increase so radically and rapidly that no complex agricultural society could ever again sustain itself if it returned to hunting and gathering.

Nobody agreed to this deal: the Agricultural Revolution was a trap.