It's impossible to be certain about how our ancestors lived in the ancient past. There’s no recorded history, after all.

However, scholars are pretty sure that when we were hunter-gatherers we revered nature and the Earth in ways that are impossible to imagine today.

Ethnographers, archaeologists and anthropologists have tried to reconstruct how our ancestors would have lived before the invention of farming - and so-called ‘civilisation’ - by studying the few ritual artefacts they left behind, and the societies of tribes untouched by the modern world today in places like the Amazon rainforest.

The best guess is that our ancestors saw themselves as equals with animals. Everything - even rocks and plants - were likely imbued with the notion of a soul. The Earth was something to respect and revere.

Sometime around the late Stone Age or dawn of the Bronze Age humanity shifted in its attitudes. We came to think of the Earth and all life on it as ours to dominate.

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There were tensions as the old way of thinking gave way to the new - just as there are always tensions at times of revolutionary change, such as now.

The tensions can be seen in myths like Cain and Abel. Cain is a farmer. He represents the new way of living.

It was farmers who built the first settlements which became cities. Farmers developed the concept of land-ownership.

Before farming, nobody owned land; it was shared. Even today,........

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