Over the past 10,000 years, some of our ancestors became farmers and eventually started living in villages, later choosing kings and building large cities. We often think of this story as the story of mankind; however, this trajectory started in only a few places, often failed, and took thousands of years to spread across the globe. Why do we still think of “civilization” as the “natural” pattern for human behaviour when it happened by accident and in only a few places? The truth is that we tend to think of farming and city-life as “better,” but many northern peoples, especially those in extreme seasonal climates (LN, Fig. 1 – Mongolian Village), did not want to live this way. Some actively rejected such lifestyles, or only adopted small parts of it like herding (Janz 2007) or small-scale gardening. Recent research on changes in human economies over time shows that hunting and gathering continued in many regions, especially in the north, until as late as the 19th century (Archaeoglobe 2019). In many other regions, people hunted, gathered, and herded, but did not engage in crop agriculture until the arrival of Europeans (LN, Fig. 2 – Archaeoglobe).