A Paradigm Shift in the Field

The idea of planting a seed in the ground and it coming up, there must have been some kind of leap of understanding where somebody did that for the first time. That's the way most scholars would have completely visualized this process until fairly recently. If it's not Eureka moment, where's the smart money? Well, if you think of it more as a gradual process, once human populations started growing, they were able to cultivate more land  and became gradually more intensive. So it got momentum going and then it couldn't be reversed without complete disruption of the population. The majority of the field since about 2009 has kind of shifted their paradigm to this.