In this way, pathogens have been the protagonists in many of the most important social, political and economic transformations in history: the transition from a planet inhabited by multiple species of human to one in which Homo sapiens reigned supreme; the replacement of nomadic hunter-gatherer society with sedentary agriculture; the demise of the great empires of antiquity; the transformations of Christianity and Islam from small sects in Palestine and the Hijaz to world religions; the shift from feudalism to capitalism; the devastation wrought by European colonialism; the Agricultural and
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