 Good morning everyone. I'm Jay Stanton of Knowles.org. How and why did humans adopt agriculture? Not as a seasonal gathering of seed to supplement hunting and foraging, which we done for tens of thousands of years prior, but as a way of life defined by farming and the political and religious structures that codified it and forced it and spread it by conquest. Now when we're advancing a hypothesis it's often necessary to convince one's audience that something needs explaining in the first place. We learn usually in sixth grade social studies that agriculture was the great leap forward before which nothing happened or could happen. As students of ancestral health we know better but it's still both instructive and sobering to summarize the case against. First, nearly everything we consider behaviorally modern predates agriculture, toolmaking and usage, fire, cooking and hearths, fishing, decoration with pigments, abstract art, representational art, ceremonial burial of the dead, even monumental architecture. All predate agricultural civilization. The only major cultural milestone that postates agriculture is written language. In every case for which we have data, human lifespan, stature and state of health decreased dramatically with the adoption of agriculture. Farmers were smaller, sicker, weaker and lived shorter lives than their hunter-gatherer forebears, even our brains shrank. The first farmers worked much longer hours than the foragers of their time and their work was more difficult and onerous. Evidence of famine, large-scale war and epidemics of disease do not appear in the archaeological record before agricultural settlements. With the exception of death, who comes for us all, the four horsemen of the apocalypse be devil farmers not hunters. Hunter-gatherer societies are the freest and least hierarchical known with the smallest wealth and power disparities between members. In contrast, early agricultural societies were universally palace economies, in which both all the products of labor and the laborers themselves were literal property of the God-king, redistributed according to the whims of the gods. They provided the least freedom to their members and featured the greatest wealth and power disparities of any known social system. Hunter-gatherer tribes seem, by modern standards, relatively sane. In contrast, ancient empires like the Sumerians and the abjishman old kingdom seem utterly bizarre once we delve beyond our sixth grade social studies textbook. There are people labored over generations, apparently willingly, to create giant stone idols, ziggurats and pyramids with no practical or survival function. Everyone had their own personal God in addition to the large and ever-shifting pantheon of gods and God-kings who collectively determined even the least of their daily actions. People regularly wrote letters to their dead relatives and heard the voices of the dead. Statues of wood and stone were not only worshiped, they were clothed, fed, anointed, taken for cannubial visits with each other and obeyed as if they lived and spoke. Now, given all these strange and terrible consequences, why would anyone give up hunting and foraging and take up farming? And why, when our ancestors did take up farming, would they suddenly be driven far beyond the labor requirements of agriculture, driven to create rigid social hierarchies, subject themselves to God-kings, and build giant stone monuments? Now, I hope I've convinced you that these are interesting questions that need answering, that we can't just gloss over them as inevitable or blame them on population pressure. So, in order to answer them, I will summarize several well substantiated but orphaned hypotheses and inconvenient facts, each of which has generally been ignored or minimized because it doesn't fit into existing narratives. Then I will conclude by uniting them into a new narrative that explains how and why humans originally adopted agriculture in the Middle East, how the consequences shaped both history and the foundations of human consciousness, and how those consequences shape us even today. We begin with a seemingly unrelated book, Julian Jane's The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Jane's posts, posits, a bold but well-supported hypothesis. Humans were not conscious as we understand it today until well into the historical era. After the late Bronze Age collapse of 1200 BC, with the post Mycenaean Greeks and the Persian empires of Cyrus the Great. This seems like madness. How could unconscious humans not only live day-to-day but devise agriculture, invent writing, and build sprawling empires that lasted for thousands of years? Fortunately, Jane's defines his terms very precisely and supports his hypothesis well, which is why, despite being strongly heterodox, his work remains interesting, relevant, and well-studied over 40 years after publication. To summarize, consciousness, according to Jane's, is the ability to create a representation inside our minds, including ourselves as the observer or participant, and then ask, what happens if? Language is a necessary but insufficient precondition for consciousness because it provides the ability to construct metaphor. Now, Jane's definition is compatible with evolutionary philosophers like Daniel Dennett, who in fact speaks highly of him. In Consciousness Explained, Dennett posits the beginnings of consciousness in a closing of the loop between animals making sounds and hearing the sounds they make, gaining the ability to model that process in their own mind without vocalizing. So having defined consciousness much more clearly than most philosophers, Jane's, who was a psychologist, makes a surprisingly detailed and convincing case that early civilizations were what he calls bicameral, quote. At one point, human nature was split into an executive part called a God and a follower part called a man. The beginnings of action are not in conscious plans, reasons, and motives. They are in the actions and speeches of God's. Volition, planning, initiative is organized with no consciousness whatsoever and then told to the individual in his familiar language, sometimes with a visual or of a familiar friend or authority figure or God, or sometimes as a voice alone, the individual obeyed these hallucinated voices because he could not see what to do by himself. I can't possibly do justice to Jane's in a few minutes, so I'll touch on some examples. He first describes bicamerality via the Iliad, whose events date to about 1200 BC, quote. It is one God who makes Achilles promise not to go into battle, another who urges him to go and another who then clothes him in a golden fire, end quote. For paragraph after paragraph, he shows that external voices, usually the gods, though sometimes friends and family not present, motivate Achilles and Agamemnon and Helen and everyone else to action throughout the entire narrative that indeed, quote, there is no consciousness in the Iliad. His description of Sumerian life is equally strange and gripping throughout Mesopotamia, from the earliest times of Sumer and Akkad, all lands were owned by God and men were their slaves. Of this, the Canaryform texts leave no doubt whatsoever. The God himself was a statue. The statue was not of a God, as we would say, but the God himself. He had his own house. The gods liked eating and drinking, music and dancing. They required beds to sleep in and for enjoying sex with other God statues on cannubial visits from time to time. They had to be washed and dressed and appeased with pleasant odors. They had to be taken out for drives on state occasions. The daily ritual of the temple, including the washing, dressing and feeding of the statues. Such food consisted of bread and cakes, the flesh of bulls, sheep goats, deer fish and poultry. The divine statues also had to be kept in good temper offerings of butter, fat, honey and sweet meats placed on the tables as with regular food. How is all this possible continuing as it did in some form for thousands of years as the central focus of life? Unless we posit that the human beings heard the statues speak to them, even as the heroes of the Iliad heard their gods or as Joan of Arc heard hers. And indeed had to hear them speak to know what to do. Everywhere in these texts, it is the speech of gods who decide what is to be done. It is not the human beings who are the rulers but the hallucinated voices of the gods. Each individual king or surf had his own personal God whose voice he heard and obeyed. So inextricably were a man and his personal God bound together that the composition of his personal name usually included the name of the personal God, thus making obvious the bicameral nature of the man. End quote. In conclusion, ancient civilization was very, very strange because their people were, according to modern standards, frankly schizophrenic. To be clear, Jane's hypothesis assumes that modern consciousness simply did not exist before the late Bronze Age collapsed in about 1200 BC and only fitfully for hundreds of years thereafter. Now it's become fashionable today to credit his many insights into the nature of consciousness while minimizing or completely ignoring his central hypothesis because it's so audacious. Indeed, the major problem I find is that the few hunter-gatherer cultures that survived into the modern age, and for which we have first contact reports seem relatively sane with no obvious sign of bicamerality. Ahadza, the Juwasi or Bushmen, the Inupiat and Yupik and dozens of others all have gods, stories of the gods, but the gods usually do not command, and if they do, the people do not unthinkingly obey. Quote, the Juwasi gods did not worry about human shortcomings or concern themselves with human behavior, nor did the Juwasi look to the gods for moral leadership. The gods didn't punish moral wrongdoing or reward moral virtue. They did not try to bend anyone to their will. End quote. That's from Elizabeth Marshall-Thomas in the old way. So, game over for Julian Jaynes, right? Well, perhaps not. Jaynes' evidence is all post-agricultural. As was standard during his time, he assumes nothing interesting happened before the so-called Great Leap Forward. We now know that's not true, so I asked myself, what if Jaynes is right? And early agricultural civilizations were all bicameral. Did something about farming cause us to lose our minds? Did only the crazy people become farmers? Did farming itself drive us crazy? What if somehow it did? Gobakli Tepe is a huge man-made mound at the top of a mountain ridge in southeast Turkey, just miles from the first known evidence of wheat domestication. Its existence was thought unremarkable until Klaus Schmidt, a German archaeologist, began excavating it in 94. He found a huge complex containing circle after circle of intricately carved T-shaped stone megaliths covering the entire hilltop, of which only 5% have yet been uncovered. The megaliths themselves are similar to others found in the area, though larger and older. What's surprising is that the earliest and largest megaliths at Gobakli Tepe date to 11,500 years before present, at least 1,000 years before the first evidence of wheat domestication and the abandonment of foraging in the area. I'll summarize it strangeness in a few bullet points. First, broken animal bones are abundant at Gobakli Tepe, but there are almost no plant or grain remains, consistent with being built by counter-gatherers. Gobakli Tepe is located many miles from the nearest source of surface water. There are no hearts and no clear evidence that fire was ever used at the site. There are no buildings, no evidence that anyone ever lived there, nor that the entire complex had any practical function whatsoever, bolstered by the lack of water or fire in its location atop a mountain. The megaliths and the hundreds of other sculptures found around them are skillfully carved. As such, it seems unlikely that Gobakli Tepe is the first such site to exist, just the first we've found so far. In summary, the endless tons of stone carved over generations to create the dozens of circles at Gobakli Tepe appear to have purely ritual significance. Furthermore, Gobakli Tepe predates the agricultural transition, upending the standard narrative that farming allowed us to settle down, cooperate, and build great works. Instead, it suggests the opposite, that the drive to create massive ritual sites like Gobakli Tepe somehow caused us to settle down and take up farming. But why? What made us decide that building giant intricately carved stone circles to no practical purpose was important? I'll summarize some more facts and hypotheses in Gobakli Tepe's place in the big picture should become clear. Gluten exorphins. Some proteins are fully digestible. Our digestive enzymes break the protein chains down completely or nearly so. In contrast, grain proteins are difficult for us to digest. Some of the resulting protein fragments remain unbroken. More importantly, some of the fragments in wheat and other gluten grains are bioactive. The first are known as opioid peptides or gluten exorphins. At least five have been identified in wheat protein and verified to stimulate the opiate receptor, just like opiate drugs do. They produce pain relief and reduction of anxiety and are comparable in strength to morphine. Now this shouldn't by itself be a problem, because the tight junctions of our intestinal epithelium should keep them within the digestive tract and out of our bloodstream. In fact, other foods also contain opiate peptides. We found them in milk, cheese, even spinach. However, wheat also contains other protein fragments that stimulate zonulin release. Zonulin opens the tight junctions in our intestines, allowing these larger protein fragments, including the gluten exorphins, to enter our bloodstream and exert those bioactive and disruptive effects. Thus, we conclude with a warning and two relevant findings. First, gluten exorphins and zonulin release act upon everyone, not just those genetically predisposed to celiac disease. Next, allowing partially digested proteins in your bloodstream via zonulin release causes all sorts of biochemical havoc, including mental disruption, which I'll discuss later, as well as digestive problems, autoimmune disease, and systemic inflammation. Finally, wheat and other gluten grains stimulate our opiate receptors. They are addictive drugs. Now, since wheat and other gluten grains are quite literally addictive drugs, as well as foodstuffs, we would expect addiction to drive the adoption of agriculture despite its many negative consequences. Indeed, Greg Wadley and Angus Martin advanced this hypothesis all the way back in 1993. Quote, cereals and dairy foods are not natural human foods, but rather are preferred because they contain exorphins. This chemical reward was the incentive for the adoption of cereal agriculture in the Neolithic. Unquote. However, they go even farther, taking seriously the effect of opioids on human behavior. Quote, civilization arose because reliable on-demand availability of dietary opioids to individuals changed their behavior, reducing aggression, and allowed them to become tolerant of sedentary life in crowded groups, to perform regular work, and to be more easily subjugated by rulers. Two socioeconomic classes emerged where before there had been only one, thus establishing a pattern which has been prevalent since that time. In summary, for Wadley and Martin, gluten grains are Aldous Huxley's Soma. They didn't just ensnare us with addiction. They pacified us so greatly that we were willing to accept a shorter and sicker life of monotonous toil subjugated to hierarchical authority and the violent conflicts of agrarian society in order to maintain our addiction. Now, particularly across Europeans and West Asians and simultaneous with the transition from farming villages to the first kingdoms, we find evidence of a massive genetic bottleneck between five and seven thousand years ago. Perhaps one of 20 male lineages survived, whereas females appear to have been unaffected. As Zangan at Al State, this is consistent with brutal warfare in which the losers were slaughtered to the last man and the women taken as war brides. It would have exerted massive selection pressure favoring those best suited and most willing to hear the voices of the gods to submit themselves as one to define authority and the palace economy. Beer versus bread. We think of bread as fundamental, the staff of life, and beer as recreational invented later. However, there is a reasonable contrary hypothesis, first advanced by Jonathan Sauer in 1953 and extended by many others since then. The debate occurs because we lack hard evidence. So, at the risk of oversimplifying an issue over which an entire presentation could be made and indeed has many times. I offer the following. First, the drive to consume alcohol is shared by all human cultures and humans from ancestral cultures seem particularly vulnerable to alcohol addiction. Porridge, which everyone forgets about, is simply soaked ground grains. Beer can be fermented porridge. Porridge, beer, and flatbread are steps along a continuum of water content and increasing complexity. Ancient beer was chunky enough that people used a straw to drink it so they could avoid consuming the solids. Finally, I am unaware of any ancient culture whose written records mentioned bread but not beer or any unambiguous evidence that one has existed to the exclusion of the other. Thus, I contend our safest assumption is that beer porridge and bread were contemporaneous. Accordingly, I contend that the strong incentive salience of alcohol consumption is synergistic with the strong incentive salience of gluten exorphins. Thus, this synergy multiplied the addictiveness of wheat and further motivated early humans to sacrifice not only their health but their entire existing way of life to obtain more of it. Gluten grains and schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is about 80% heritable, strongly polygenic, and also strongly dependent on environment in ways we're just beginning to understand. This supports the concept of schizotypy, a continuum of more or less schizoid behavior as opposed to a distinct disease you either have or don't. Positive forms of schizotypy but not full-blown schizophrenia have been linked to verbal fluency, creativity, poetry, and art in general. I contend that schizophrenia is in large part the result of evolutionary mismatch. Does a wheat-based diet push creativity into frank schizophrenia? There is strong evidence. 20 to 25% of schizophrenics have anti-gliadin antibodies versus 3% or less in the general population. Those with recent onset psychosis have higher levels of such antibodies. Gluten-free diets dramatically improve symptoms of a significant number of schizophrenics, though not all, and subsequent gluten challenge disturbs recovery. Schizophrenia was essentially unknown amongst ancestral cultures eating ancestral new diets in New Guinea and Micronesia. When a Western diet was adopted, schizophrenia reached Western levels. Afro-Caribbean and Sub-Saharan African immigrants and residents of the UK and Sweden suffer schizophrenia and other non-effective psychosis at anywhere from six to ten times the rate of native whites, despite no indication that the same is true in their native countries. In contrast, Asian, Middle Eastern and North African immigrants do not. Now this is typically blamed on racial prejudice or unspecified environmental hazard, but I know that wheat and gluten grains do not grow in equatorial climates where tropical starches like cassava, sorghum and bananas dominate the diet. I find a massive increase in wheat consumption upon emigration from the gluten-naive tropics to be a more plausible explanation. Further, the risk increases in second generation migrants, inconsistent with cultural difficulties, but consistent with the hypothesis of gluten grains, since schizophrenia typically presents early in life, late childhood and early adulthood. Now, as we've seen, Julian Jayne's bicameral consciousness looks like certain forms of schizophrenia, hearing voices, even seeing visions that command to action. He makes this comparison himself. And the fact that schizophrenia is related to deficits of what we today call executive function fits both Dennett's model of consciousness and Jayne's description of bicamerality, executive function outsourced to the voices of the gods. Furthermore, the astounding beauty and fidelity of even the most ancient artwork and the prevent city of all known cultures, ancestral or not to tell stories shows us how the creative impulse likely became due to wheat induced schizophrenia, the voices of the gods. Now that we have all the pieces, let's put our knowledge together into the big picture and tell the new story of how and why humans became farmers. We begin in the upper Paleolithic. Hunter gatherers discover that wild grains can be edible. Once heavily processed, harvested, threshed, de-hust, ground fermented and or baked. Those foragers with the strongest genetic susceptibility to gluten exorphins and zonulin release were the most motivated to increase their intake of gluten grains via beer and bread and thus to devote more and more time and energy to their gathering, processing, storage and consumption. This created a positive feedback loop of selection pressure, both genetic and cultural. As we didn't a grew, so did schizophrenia and schizotypy and thus the voices of the gods became real amongst a growing fraction of the population. Rituals and idols here to form manifestations of creativity were discovered to wake the voices of the gods amongst the only marginally schizophrenic. Larger and more elaborate idols and ritual spaces were built boosting social cohesion by normalizing and venerating what James calls bicameral thought, hearing and obeying the voices of the gods. The positive feedback loop of selection pressure, both genetic and cultural continues. A combination of social pressure to consume more of the food of the gods, population pressure created by the massive group efforts required to build ritual sites like gobbled tepe and Frank addiction to both alcohol and the opioid peptides and gluten grains drives humans to turn to agriculture, abandon foraging entirely and become sedentary farmers. Disease, developmental abnormality and mortality rapidly increase as does time spent working. Height and health rapidly decrease, but farmers are now bicameral and addicted, having been genetically and behaviorally selected for wheat addiction and schizotypy for over 10,000 years. Farming requires the then new concept of land as property. It depends on the gods to bring rain or the flood. It requires shared labor and responsibility for irrigation channels. Strongly hierarchical and authoritarian social systems based on divine authority, easily and efficiently organize and rule schizophrenic opioid addicted farmers used to hearing the voices of the gods. Their societies grow and expand, mostly by conquest. As farming villages expanded into kingdoms and met each other, brutal warfare ensued in which other villages were slaughtered to the last man and their women taken as war brides. The survivors over thousands of years formed the empires we know today from ancient history, Sumerians, Acadians, Egyptians, and so on. This male lineage bottleneck, which perhaps one of 20 male gene lines survived, produced massive selection pressure to conform to large hierarchical bicameral societies to hear and obey the voices of the gods and their avatars, the god kings. An ancient Sumerian proverb reads, act promptly, make your god happy. Palace economies are the result, the most hierarchical, authoritarian social systems known. As the bicameral kingdoms grew into empires, their people became more and more driven by their addiction to wheat and consumed it nearly to the exclusion of all other foods. Ancient Egyptian laborers were paid in bread and beer, which also served as currency. However, as empires grew larger, more complex thought was necessary to run them and even to live within them. Writing was invented, first purely as record keeping and only later extended into written admonitions from the gods. Bigger monuments and more complex rituals were required to maintain the bicameral voices in the face of literacy and increasing social complexity, culminating in the dozens of gods and massive elaborate pyramids of the Old Kingdom of Egypt, which, though looted of their riches, still stand today. Meanwhile, however, once everyone was already a farmer, selection pressure began rewarding greater health on a wheat-based diet. Perhaps more importantly, navigating ever-increasing social complexity rewarded independent thought as long as action remains within societal and behavioral norms. Thus, after thousands of years of selection pressure for wheat addiction, schizophrenia, and unthinking conformity and obedience, selection pressure began to act for resistance to wheat induced bicamerality, for the ability to think and to deceive while remaining within social norms. Most particularly amongst the merchant and ruling classes. It remains an open question whether and for how long bicameral masses were ruled by conscious leaders. Their richer, more nutritious and less wheat-based diet compared to the common laborer seems a likely factor. Slowly, painfully, the bicameral empires buckled under the increasing burden of complex rituals and endless monument building necessary to maintain the voices of the gods, receding under selection pressure that rewarded conscious thought. They were conquered and replaced externally or by revolution because of the much greater freedom of action afforded to those who didn't have to wait for the gods to tell them what to do, especially in times of change and crisis. A major inflection point has reached 3,200 years ago with the late Bronze Age collapse, in which from the Aegean Sea to North Africa, bicameral kingdoms and their palace economies fell. Mycenaean Greece, Babylonians, Hittites, the new Kingdom of Egypt and many more all fell into chaos and dark ages. On the other side, hundreds of years later, the Iron Age, Cyrus the Great, Classical Greece and Sparta, history familiar and comprehensible to modern minds, history we can make movies from. Meanwhile, and listen closely because this is the crux, the genetic and behavioral legacy of thousands of years of wheat induced by camorality remains in schizophrenia in the still common practices of divination and fortune telling, seeking guidance from God's now silent in our reverence for beer and bread in the voices and visions of our saints recorded in our holy books in our willing submission to authority and hierarchy, especially when couched in formal ceremony and religious mystery. And in many other ways, we will no doubt discover as we interpret our past and our present in light of this hypothesis. In summary, wheat domesticated humans as much as humans domesticated wheat. Beer and bread addiction created a positive feedback loop that not only pacified us, it literally changed the nature of human consciousness for thousands of years. These changes were not a result of the transition to agriculture. They enabled and caused the transition. Early Middle Eastern negrarian civilizations seem insane by modern standards because they were. What James calls bicamerality and we call schizophrenia was the cultural and behavioral norm. We cannot understand these early civilizations without grasping these concepts. And we cannot understand modern human behavior without comprehending how tens of thousands of years of wheat addiction and consequent bicamerality has shaped both our culture and our genome. I'm Jay Stanton, Knowles.org. Thank you. Thank you, Jay. That was fascinating. We have a full 10 minutes for questions so you guys can line up at the mic. Amazing as always, Jay. Thank you so much. And a quick comment before we begin the Q&A. If you enjoy my work and my research for all those watching this later on video, I have a novel out. It's called the Noel Credo. If you like to support me, please buy it off Amazon or wherever else you can find it. Thank you. Well, I have been biting some necks, but I'm still alive. Wonderful. OK, anyway, what's up? Considering that there are other grains that don't include gluten, you know, in Asia, obviously rice and in the Americas, corn. Could there be other factors, you know, opioids, cocaine, things like that, or just brewing in general that might also feed into this? Well, Mesoamerica and the Far East are their own subjects entirely. Civilization looks different there and they each deserve their own presentation. I couldn't possibly cram information about that into this 30 minutes. So I would love to do that someday. Today isn't the time. Thank you. Thank you. That was really fun. And I appreciate like such a massive story crammed into such a short time that definitely deserves to be unpacked and told in a really big form. One thing that occurred to me that it's occurred to me over the years, serial grasses thrive in a carbon dioxide rich environment. So in relation to your claim that wheat has domesticated us, not vice versa, what about the idea that wheat has actually all along been driving us toward industrialization to produce carbon to make their environment more appropriate for them? That's a fascinating hypothesis. And of course, we can't argue that wheat is consciously doing that. At least I don't think we can make that argument. But it is certainly possible to put that out there and say if wheat has indeed had that consequence, which that's very much Richard Dawkins viewpoint. If you read the extended phenotype, yes, exactly, the idea that genes have effects far beyond the organism in which they find themselves. Genes have effects on their can have effects on their immediate environment and they can have their effects, you know, on the entire on the entire earth. You can look up the Azolla event if you want an interesting introduction to that versus world climate. Thank you. So, yeah, a topic that could that could have its own symposium for sure. We had a great talk last night about how this was taking place also in the Far East and not just in the Middle East, and you could go on and on about that. So two things. Number one, are you familiar with the work of Ian McGillcrest who kind of carried on Jane's work? So Ian McGillcrest wrote Master in the Emissary or Master and his Emissary. If you haven't checked it out, you should check it out. It's good stuff. Thank you, I will. And the other point I would like to make is there is there's for sure an overlay here. So if you've read food of the gods from Terrence McKenna, I think that plays into this whole narrative because I'm quite sure that humans did as they were hunting and gathering come across psilocybin mushrooms. And it could be argued that this battle over grains and wheat was in some sense to strip that that ability for the common man to have access to these substances. It would unleash creativity. Absolutely. And I mean that piece of data shows that, yeah, the drive to intoxication is very, very, very old. And the interesting thing about psilocybin is because with mushrooms, we've separated the drug like effect and the food effect. You can't possibly eat enough psilocybin mushrooms to have a meal, whereas with wheat, they're integrated in one convenient package. And I think that's the main circumstance here that causes the effects of the two to be very, very, very different over time. Also the fact that psilocybin is a psychedelic, whereas wheat is an opioid. And, you know, we all know about the differences there. Well, fascinating analysis. And what it, you know, your analysis seems to suggest is that if you were to look at non-opioid agricultural, you know, like New World kind of populations, you shouldn't see schizophrenia in them. They should be, or it should be at the 3% rate or something, because there was no selection pressure that period that you're talking about with the wheat agricultural areas. And also in the earliest writings that they have from those civilizations, you shouldn't find evidence of the bicameral mind in those writings. Do you know if there's any evidence supporting that? Yeah. I haven't spent a lot of time on either, you know, Far East or on Mesoamerica, because again, there are so huge, such huge topics by themselves, but we need to remember here that we've got two, we've got two selection ramps. We've got the selection ramp for addiction and for bicamerality, and then at some point that ramps back down to actually produce selection once the, once the environment changes to a fully bicameral environment, you actually have some selection pressure, I believe, going the other direction. So what state were we in before all that started happening in the first place? That's an interesting and open question. For instance, we know that the Mesoamerican population is, there's a very small founding population there, which is why, for instance, smallpox devastates them so badly. They don't have the HLA alleles that can confer any sort of immunity. So just smallpox just ravaged the Americas again and again and again, because there wasn't the genetic diversity to deal with, to deal with it. So it's an excellent question and I freely admit I don't know the answer. Okay, the pre-agricultural populations will be where you get the baseline to compare all post-agricultural populations. But it would be an interesting analysis. Absolutely would, I agree. Can you please say a little bit more about Gabecli Tepe through the lens of your narrative? Why did those pre-agricultural people build it? Well, again, because we have to remember that the process of consuming, we began far before agriculture. We have evidence that, you know, if you look on the timeline from a few slides ago, where are we here? Yeah, Mahalo 2 is generally, that's 23,000 years ago, and there's very good evidence of large scale grain processing at that site, despite the fact that that was still a purely 100 gatherer culture. There's no evidence of agriculture whatsoever, but there's abundant wild grains growing in the area, and we have very good evidence that they gathered and stored and consume them not just during the very short harvest season, but as long as they had stored grain. So, yeah, the idea is, you know, we had been consuming wheat for a very, very long time, not a very long time in archaeological or anthropological terms, but for thousands of years before Gabecli Tepe and before the full transition to agriculture occurred, during which there would have been major selection pressure with, you know, cultural selection, you know, people kind of self-asort in that case. The cultures with the, you know, people who were most susceptible to wheat addiction would tend to associate with other people like that because that would become more and more the center of their lives. So I think you, if you could go back in time, you could probably see some sort of self-segregation happening there where the people who were really, really susceptible to wheat addiction tried to center their life more and more around gathering the grain, and the people who weren't were kind of, you know, that isn't, yeah, that isn't as good of quality food, we'd rather eat the meat. So that's, that's my explanation. Hi, so it occurs to me that your narrative could be taken either in support of eating grain or not in support of eating grains. On the one hand, you could say that grain gave us all of this industrialization, all of this great modern society. On the other hand, you could say it gave us schizophrenia or whatever. So how do you suggest going about navigating that decision and like, like, how do you approach that? Well, the process of getting to where we are now involved, unthinkable brutality. I mean, it's easy to live, you know, we live in literally the most peaceful post- agricultural age to ever have existed. I mean, the, if you look at just, you know, a hundred years ago, you have World War I and then World War II within just a few decades after that, during which a significant fraction of the world population died between the war and the influenza pandemics that happened simultaneously in Stalinist Russia and everything, everything else. I mean, you can look around the rest of the world and there's still unthinkable cruelty going on now. You know, how recently was the Rwandan genocide? How recently was, you know, Pol Pot only a few decades? You know, all these, all these just unthinkable, all this unthinkable madness. And yeah, we're, we are very, very fortunate to live in the time and the place that we do, but we have to be careful with the selection bias there because we, you know, when we look at the, when we look at the history and what got us here and everything else, it's pretty, it's pretty brutal. So, and the, the other main and most important factor, I believe is you can't go back upstream. You can't, you can't change the past. We're where we are. We're where we are as a result of what happened that happened. And if we want to move forward and improve things, I think it's very, very important to understand how we got there and why we're so susceptible to things like arbitrary authority couched in ceremony, both political and religious. And, you know, why were, why we have such this bizarre exaggerated reverence for beer and bread? Like you ever, you ever noticed like if you go to your doctor and say, hey, you know, when I eat almonds, you know, I feel weird. And they say, well, try and not eating almonds for a while and see what happens. If you go to your doctor and say, hey, you know, I think I might be a gluten sensitive like, no, you need a prescription not to eat bread. I mean, it's it's it's a very strange attitude. And I think I think there's actually been a strong both genetic and cultural selection for that. So understanding that we can use that knowledge to move forward and say, yeah, what do we do about it? So it's actually we have to take our break now. We have 10 minutes till the next session. So thank you so much, Jay.