ONTRARY to the traditional narrative, there is no magic moment when Homo sapiens crosses some fateful line that separates hunting and foraging from agriculture—from prehistory to history, from savagery to civilization. The moment when a seed or tuber is deposited in prepared soil is more properly seen as one event—and not in itself a very significant one to those doing it—in a long and historically very deep skein of landscape modification starting with Homo erectus and fire.
