This is John Batchel, conversation with Professor of Global History, Peter Frankapan at Oxford University.

His new book tells the story of how mankind has advanced these thousands of years thinking progress is the result of hard work,

when in fact it's a combination of hard work and what nature

gives us to work with. In this particular conversation, the professor points to farming.

Where did it come from? Was it a moment when someone like a Benjamin Franklin, a farming,

saw the better way.

Turns out it was collectively over a long period of time farming.

Experimentation.

And also concerns about the calorie load. Here is Peter Frankapan talking about the Earth transformed and untold history how Homo sapiens,

the hunter-gatherer, turned to farming and changing the landscape and changing the diet

and changing the outcome. Much more of this later tonight.

I mean, a lot depends on what these terms mean,

and in the absence of written evidence, who chooses to apply them?

So we think of farming as something that is a homestead,

where there's a small family, perhaps,

that is deliberately cultivating a set number of fields for their own benefits and perhaps

surplus that they can do something with but in other ways the domestication of crops and even the

domestication of animals it's it's quite a gray area i mean in fact even today those distinctions

about what is a hunter-gatherer who is sedentary who, who is nomadic. I think I'm very blurred.

And I think it just speaks to our idea that we want to see kind of breakthrough moments.

We want to be able to date when farming began and then assumed that once it had begun,

knowledge was passed on, like in a classroom, from one community to the other,

...