Even relatively unsophisticated slash-and-burn farming could support ten or twenty times more people on the same area of land. Yet for many or most of the new individuals who owed their existence to cereals, the farming life was tougher than their ancestors’ hunter-gatherer way of life: more hard physical work, much of it grindingly repetitive, a worse diet, increased levels of disease and earlier death.

— Architecture by Barnabas Calder