“There is a prediction (albeit retroactive) lurking in this idea of the liquid network, as well as in the premise that innovative environments share signature patterns at different scales. The prediction is that whenever human beings first organized themselves into settlements that resembled liquid networks, a great flowering of innovation would have immediately followed. For ages, early humans lived in the cultural equivalent of gaseous networks: small packs of hunter-gatherers bouncing around the landscape, with almost no contact between groups. But the rise of agriculture changed all that. For the first time, humans began forming groups that numbered in the thousands, or tens of thousands.”