Perspectives matter..........................

The Agricultural Revolution certainly enlarged the sum total of food at the disposal of humankind, but the extra food did not translate into a better diet or more leisure.  Rather, it translated into population explosions and pampered elites.  The average farmer worked harder than the average forager, and got a worse diet in return.  The Agricultural Revolution was history's biggest fraud.
     Who was responsible?  Neither kings, nor priests, nor merchants.  The culprits were a handful of plant species, including wheat, rice, and potatoes.  These plants domesticated Homo sapiens, rather than vice versa.
     Think for a moment about the Agricultural Revolution from the viewpoint of wheat.  Ten thousand years ago wheat was just a wild grass, one of many, confined to a small range in the Middle East.  Suddenly, within just a few short millennia, it was growing all over the world.  According to the basic evolutionary criteria of survival and reproduction, wheat has become one of the most successful plants in the history of the earth.  In areas such as the Great Plains of North America, where not a single wheat stalk grew 10,000 years ago, you can today walk for hundreds upon hundreds of miles without encountering any other plant.   Worldwide, wheat covers about 870,000 square miles of the globe's surface, almost ten times the size of Britain.  How did this grass turn from insignificant to ubiquitous?
     Wheat did it by manipulating Homo sapiens to its advantage.

-Yuval Noah Harari,  Sapiens:  A Brief History of Humankind