Feb. 5, ’16: Dramatic restructuring of Earth’s plant and animal communities. Jessica Blois

Neolithic Revolution, a term synonymous with our invention of agriculture, suggests humans abandoned hunter-gatherer ways, picking up the hoe rather abruptly some 10,000 years back. Actually more drawn-out and complex, that transformation began altering Earth’s climate long before the Industrial Revolution’s fossil fuel combustion did. Now biologists, publishing in the journal Nature, present evidence that Homo Sapiens’ recent adoption of farming ways also coincides with a “dramatic restructuring of Earth’s plant and animal communities”, not seen in earlier fossil records over several hundred million years. Join UC Merced’s Jessica Blois, co-author of that Nature article, and “Down on the Farm” host Tom Willey.

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