Turning Points

Turning points in sports happen all the time. One team is down by a lot of points, and then they suddenly rally to come from behind—the turning point of the game. It’s supposed to represent the point at which things really change direction.

Besides sports broadcasters and writers, historians also have a penchant for using the term “turning point.” While they might be discussing a turning point within a specific battle, they more often mean an event that changes the course of human history.

One of these much-discussed events is the agricultural revolution, where the popular version of the story goes like this: humans before a certain point in time, maybe 12,000 years ago, people walked around everywhere in order to find food. If there was food close by, they might not have to walk very far, but every day, humans gathered vegetables, nuts, berries, and the like, or killed some kind of animal, or both.

Then, suddenly and all at once, people started farming everywhere, ushering in the agr…