Nobody chose agriculture, and after a while nobody could refuse it. Part I follows Diamond: domestication could not have been a conscious choice because the idea of a domesticated plant was alien to a hunter-gatherer, and the first steps were taken by people with no conception of the multigenerational process they were in. Then it locked: more efficient food production raised population density, and higher density demanded more production, an autocatalytic loop. Part I's conclusion is that increasing population densities had burned humanity's bridges and we could no longer go back. This is the book's cleanest case of a transition no actor decided and none could reverse.

Evidence 1 passage

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Increasing population densities had burned humanity’s bridges.[^122] We could no longer go back. While the agricultural revolution was not a conscious choice, it was a momentous one that dramatically changed the environment, and relatedly the risk landscape, that humans had to interact with. The c

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