The Neolithic Revolution in the Levant and Mesopotamia marked the first domestication of plants, animals, and humans. With our sedentarization, we opened ourselves up to cultures being diminished ecologically, nutritionally, and spiritually, and to the construction of hierarchical, centralized, socialpolitical regimes and their inherent inhibition of liberties. Occasionally romanticized by anthropologists as “the original affluent society,” pre-Neolithic hunting-and-gathering cultures inspire us to imagine other ways of being human and of interacting differently with space and time, with other species and ecologies.
