The Natufians are thought to be the first people anywhere to experiment systematically with farming. But we have no idea what languages they spoke, or what they called themselves. This population, who are associated with parts of the Middle East from 12,500 to 9,500 years ago, owe the suitably ancient-sounding name to the imagination of a far more recent pioneer in the world of work, Dorothy Garrod, an archaeologist and a contemporary of Vere Gordon Childe. She named the Natufians after one of the archaeological sites where she found evidence of this culture, the Wadi al Natuf, in what was then British Palestine.

As farming societies grew more productive and captured more energy from their environments, energy appeared to be scarcer and people had to work harder to meet their basic needs. This was because, up until the Industrial Revolution, any gains in productivity farming peoples generated as a result of working harder, adopting new technologies, techniques, or crops, or acquiring new land were always soon gobbled up by populations that quickly grew to numbers that could not be sustained. As a result, while agricultural societies continued to expand, prosperity was usually only ever fleeting, and scarcity evolved from an occasional inconvenience that foragers stoically endured every once in a while to a near perennial problem. In many respects, the hundreds of generations of farmers who lived before the fossil-fuel revolution paid for our extended lifespans and expanded waistlines now by enduring lives that were mostly shorter, bleaker, and harder than ours, and almost certainly tougher than those of their foraging ancestors.

As a result of this and the appropriation of other mammalian habitats for agriculture and human settlement, people and their domestic animals now comprise a remarkable 96 percent of all mammalian biomass on the planet. Humans account for 36 percent of that total, and the livestock that we nurture, nourish, and then send to the slaughterhouse—mainly in the form of cattle, pigs, sheep, and goats—account for 60 percent. The remaining 4 percent are the ever-diminishing populations of wild animals who now cower in our hedgerows, pose for tourists, and dodge poachers in our nature reserves, national parks, and a dwindling number of wild refuges. Wild avifauna have not fared that much better. With around 66 billion chickens being produced and destroyed for human consumption every year, the total living biomass of domesticated fowl at any one time is estimated to now be triple that of wild birds.

Over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the desire of poorer people in cities across Europe to consume what were once luxuries enjoyed only by the very rich was just as influential in shaping the history of work as the invention of technologies to exploit the energy in fossil fuels. Without it, there would have been no markets for mass-produced items, and without markets the factories would never have been built. It also rewrote the rules by which much of the economy operated. The growth of Britain’s economy increasingly came to depend on people employed in manufacturing and other industries reinvesting their wages in the very same products they and their factory workers manufactured.

The results of this ambitious exercise were first presented to the Club of Rome in private and then published, in 1972, in a book, The Limits to Growth. The conclusions Meadows and his team reached were very different from Keynes’s utopian dream. They were also not what the Club of Rome, nor anyone else for that matter, wanted to hear.

Aggregating the outcomes of the various scenarios they fed into their mainframes showed unequivocally that if there were no significant changes to historical economic and population growth trends—if business continued as usual—then the world would witness a “sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity” within a century. In other words, their data showed that our continued preoccupation with solving the economic problem was the starkest problem facing humankind and that the likeliest outcome if things continued was catastrophe.