Kyle Harper

And so people start – like the first livestock that are domesticated are goats.

And nobody says like, hey, let's become goat farmers.

The goats are wild.

They're ibexes and people are hungry.

And so they start managing them to only kill the males to make sure that they can reproduce.

And they start pinning them and they start killing the wolves who are trying to attack them.

And over very, very, very long periods of time, this becomes this tight mutualistic relationship where –

All of a sudden, we're goat farmers.

But no generation makes that whole decision for anybody.

So that's part of it is that it's unintended consequences that are made in very, very incremental steps.

And then two is like I definitely agree that there's some kind of like cultural selection here where the farming groups are simply so much –

more adapted to extract the energy efficiently from the environment, right?

It's all about energy.

You want to multiply, you want to grow, you want to survive.

It's all about energy.

And so the, you know, foragers require huge landscapes to extract enough energy to feed themselves and grow and reproduce.

Whereas farmers per unit of land can extract

such higher rates of energy that then can be, you know, through photosynthesis is captured and turned into edible sugars that we can metabolize.

And so those populations are just growing faster that they, you know, quote, unquote, outcompete the hunter-gatherer populations, say, of Europe that are largely but not completely

Now, on top of that – so just like the energy story alone is a big piece of it.