Agriculture started to appear independently in the Near East, the Andes, Mexico, China, the highlands of New Guinea, the Brazilian rainforest and the African Sahel – all within a few thousand years. Something made it inevitable, almost compulsory around this time: however much it eventually resulted in misery, disease and despotism in the long run, it clearly gave its first practitioners competitive advantage. Yet farming was not an overnight transition. It was the culmination of a long, slow intensification of human diet that took tens of thousands of years. In search of extra calories people
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