The second crucial point of convergence was far more recent, and arguably far more transformative. It began some 12,000 years ago when some of our ancestors began to routinely store food and experiment with cultivation, transforming their relationships with their environments, with each other, with scarcity, and with work. Exploring this point of convergence also reveals how much of the formal economic architecture around which we organize our working lives today had its origins in farming and how intimately our ideas about equality and status are bound into our attitudes to work.

In the summer of 1957, James Woodburn scrambled up the Serengeti Plateau to reach the shores of Lake Eyasi, where he became the first social anthropologist to develop a long-term relationship with the Hadzabe. In the 1960s, he was also was one of the most influential among the cohort of young anthropologists who spearheaded the resurgence in hunter-gatherer studies. And just like Richard Lee, he was struck by how little effort it took for the bow-hunting Hadzabe to feed themselves. In the early 1960s, he described the Hadzabe as irrepressible small-stakes gamblers who were far more preoccupied with winning and losing arrows from one another in games of chance than with wondering about where their next meal would come from. He also noted that, like the Ju/’hoansi, they met nutritional needs easily, “without much effort, much forethought, much equipment or much organization.

Göbekli Tepe will always cling to its deepest secrets. But at least its importance in the history of our species’ relationship with work is clear. For beyond being a monument to the first experiments with agriculture, it is the first evidence anywhere of people securing sufficient surplus energy to work over many consecutive generations to achieve a grand vision unrelated to the immediate challenge of securing more energy, and one that was intended to endure long beyond the lives of its builders.

To foragers, change was immanent in the environment—it happened all the time, when the wind blew, the rain fell, or an elephant cleared a new path. But change was always constrained by a deeper sense of confidence in the continuity and predictability of the world around them. Every season was different from those that preceded it, yet these differences always fell within a range of predictable changes. Thus for the Ju/’hoansi, when they were still free to forage as their ancestors had, carrying the weight of history was as inconvenient as carrying a house around, and abandoning the deep past freed them to engage with the world around them unencumbered by ancient precedents or future ambitions.

The wealth built in Kimberley set many white people on a trajectory to prosperity. It was a springboard that created a base for further investments and enrichment when more gold deposits were found on the Witwatersrand. The glittering stones buried under the soil created individuals with long-lasting legacies. After 150 years, their surnames are deeply engraved in South Africa, appearing in names of universities, scholarships, towns and a collection of artifacts related to literature, arts and culture. Unfortunately, the generations of those ancestors deprived of mining licenses more than a century ago, had not much to show their labour.