Once in a while, even in works of popular history, an author will raise the prospect that what happened twelve thousand years ago, during the so-called Agricultural Revolution, wasn’t that humans domesticated plants but that plants domesticated humans. From a Richard Dawkins ‘selfish gene’ perspective, this makes a kind of sense. To ensure the survival of its DNA, a plant was shrewd to offer itself up as a staple to the human diet. Armies of human slaves were soon organized and trained to cultivate and protect generation after generation of its offspring. Authors mean this as provocation, I suppose, something Read more