"By the sweat of thy brow shalt thou earn thy daily bread." It's tempting, I agree, to romanticize our species' distant past, to imagine that our hunter-gather

"By the sweat of thy brow shalt thou earn thy daily bread." It's tempting, I agree, to romanticize our species' distant past, to imagine that our hunter-gatherer ancestors enjoyed what Christian mythology calls the Garden of Eden, and that, had they but not invented agriculture, with its ties to the land and its back-breaking labor, we would even today still recline in paradisaical idyll. Perhaps that's even true, although I doubt it. But the arrow of time has only one head.