Kyle Harper

The diseases that are suffered by, say, people by the time of the Roman Empire are absolutely much worse than what had been, you know, the case in Stone Age times.

I mean, I would...

First thing, say – like it's important.

I think you were starting to get at this, that there's never like a generation of humans that has the opportunity to make this choice once and for all.

Like should we stay like hunting mammoths or should we become sedentary farmers with like –

basically torturous dentistry and die by diarrhea.

Like this happens over thousands of years through an evolutionary process where nobody can – it's a story of unintended consequences, right?

I mean the mammoth are gone because – partly because we killed them all.

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?