Agricultural heritage across the millennia

Let’s turn the clock back 4,000 years. Woolly mammoths roam the Arctic tundra, Stonehenge is under construction, and the Sahara is still largely a vegetated savannah landscape. The entirety of humanity consists of just 27 million people — smaller than the population of today’s Tokyo metropolitan area. And at this time, somewhere in the ancient Sumerian city-state of Ur, a scribe is engraving a series of cuneiform tablets with what is now the world’s oldest known example of a legal code.