5,800 YEARS AGOAugust, 3,787 BC

the most wide-ranging revolution ever experienced on this island occurred. Late Stone Age farmers started planting barley and wheat here for the first time. Wheat - alongside maize and rice elsewhere - ultimately resulted in the vast expansion of the population of the island although the population here did fall back during the Bronze Age. Over the past 10k years the world’s population has increased from less than 10m people to over six billion. It’s been suggested the first person to ever plant wheat was probably a woman. As the female gatherer to the male hunter in earlier neolithic hunter gatherer society, it was most likely a woman who gathered and planted the seeds to spark this agricultural revolution. Wherever the new farmers went, they brought sowing, reaping, threshing, baking, fermenting, owning, hoarding. In Europe the agriculture revolution had been in train for thousands of years earlier.