Jamie Metzl

Our brains could expand where we could have social organization.

And our social organization and our cultural heritage is why we are more powerful than all of these animals that have much stronger muscles than we have.

And by changing that world and building those communities, we then had the mental capacity to start saying, what are the stories around us?

And that's the foundation for animism.

And then 12,000 years ago, starting 12,000 years ago in many different places, we started to uncover at the end of the last ice age the ability to grow crops, the beginnings of agriculture.

And in these agricultural worlds, we said, well, how is this all happening?

And so we came up with these different stories about agriculture.

And that's why all of our traditions have these agricultural rhythms.

And every time there's a harvest ceremony, like all of our religions have, that's about agriculture.

And ancient Egyptians, they had these agricultural gods like Osiris and Rinenet.

And they were these gods that represented the spirit in

of agriculture.

And in the Americas, we have the Mesoamerican corn gods.

And you can understand why there were these corn gods, because it's not just the domestication of corn.

The teosinte weed, which is the precursor of corn, it doesn't look a thing like corn.

It's like a weed, and it's got a few very rough kernels.

And so over thousands of years, corn was

created essentially by our ancestors, at least in the Americas.

And it was corn.

So it's biotech.