David Reich

And, you know, these people are distributed into different parts of the world.

The Americas, you know, 15,000 years ago or whatever it is, you know,

New Guinea 40,000 years ago, East Asia, Europe, West Africa, no farming develops before 12 or 11,000 years ago.

It only develops in the last 12,000 years, the period known as the Holocene, which is sort of the end of the Ice Age.

And if you talk to climate scientists and archaeologists,

I keep asking people this question every time I meet someone who's an expert in this.

It's like, how can this be that farming develops in all these places?

Are we really living in such an unusual time?

And people tell me, indeed, we're living in a very unusual time on a scale of 2 million years.

That is, 12,000 years ago, we switched into this period of not just warmth, but climate stability.

And that...

And that actually this is true and sort of hard to believe that we're living in such a special time.

But if you look at, for example, data from the bottoms of ponds where you can measure the fluctuations of temperatures using isotopic signatures, apparently we're in a period where it's just fluctuating a lot less year to year and 10 years to 10 years and 100 years to 100 years.

And it's just a period of relative stability that we are miraculously living in.

And that when this period of relatively stability happens,

Somehow, it follows that multiple groups independently turn to agriculture, even though the genetic complement, all of whom have the same genetic complement that arises 50,000, 100,000, 200,000, 300,000 years ago.

It's kind of a crazy observation that people just accept, but it's like unbelievable.

I don't know.

I'm thinking about this all the time right now.

This is actually actively what I'm thinking about right now.