Yet the more we learn about the rise of agriculture, the more we realize that it may have cost our ancestors more trouble than it was worth. To begin with, the backbreaking process of spending almost every waking hour— from sunrise to sunset—clearing the land, plowing the earth, collecting and sowing seeds, irrigating the fields by hand, and then guarding the crops day and night against locusts and thieves, was far more time-consuming and labor-intensive than simply going out into the wild and hunting for animals that were still everywhere in abundance.
