I like reading about history, and I particularly enjoy those grand, ambitious histories that sweep up the whole human race into a single narrative. It’s all very well to learn exactly how many troops assembled at the Battle of Brandywine Creek in 1777, but that’s such a tiny part of the human story, a footnote to a footnote. I like to contemplate the whole picture. It puts our present obsessions, in perspective. The first such mega-narrative that came my way was H.G. Wells’s “Outline of History.” More recently I’ve read the highly successful book “Sapiens” by Yuval Noah Harari. The title refers to our particular species, labelled by anthropologists as Homo sapiens or wise man. We do need to find a more accurate name for ourselves. The least wise thing we humans ever did was to take up agriculture, and subsequently gardening. We all know in a general way that early humans lived as hunters and gatherers. They moved constantly from place to place, subsisting on what the land provided.