And this took the form of what for now is thought to be the oldest example of monumental architecture in the ancient world: a complex of buildings, chambers, megaliths, and passageways discovered at Göbekli Tepe in the hills near Orencik in southeastern Turkey in 1994. With construction at Göbekli Tepe having begun during the tenth millennium , it is also by far the oldest evidence of large groups of people anywhere coming together to work on a very big project that had nothing obvious to do with the food quest.

Construction was also almost certainly seasonal and done in the winter months. And, given that people back then were lucky to live beyond forty years, it is unlikely that anyone who participated in the start of the construction on any one of the bigger enclosures would have still been alive to witness its completion.

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.

Interestingly, the oldest almost-urban settlement discovered so far, Çatalhöyük in Turkey, was probably similarly materially egalitarian too. But it was not like any of the other ancient towns and cities that followed. Its ruins are made up of hundreds of similar-sized domestic dwellings clustered tightly together, almost like cells in a beehive, suggesting no one was measurably richer than anyone else. There were also no obvious public spaces like markets, squares, temples, or plazas and no public thoroughfares, paths, or roads, leaving archaeologists to conclude that people got from one place to the next by scrambling across rooftops and entering their and others’ homes through the ceilings.

The students are wisely trying to find a way to break up a big, abstract goal into smaller, more concrete subgoals. This is the right idea. But in this case the numbers are just too big. And “acreage” is not necessarily the best way to think. There are 1,500-acre plots of land that are more environmentally precious than other 90,000-acre plots. Thinking about “acreage per year” is akin to a museum curator thinking about “canvases per year,” without regard to period, style, or painter.