that you really start to re-create landscape: to produce crops on a mass scale; and to eliminate all other species (which increases reliance on farming still further). Ploughing (or soil-breaking in general) leads in short to arable farming, which primarily means mass growing of cereals. The Old Testament shows how people hated this (arable farmers have an extremely bad press in the OT) and indeed regarded the breaking of soil as blasphemous. Cain was the arable farmer ? perceived as the murderer (of the pastoral Abel) whose gift of corn was rejected by God. The "Neolithic Revolution " is not about the origin of farming; but it does reflect the birth of arable farming (ie, agriculture in the strict etymological sense). Ploughing has given us a world population of 6 billion, and transformed the world's landscape. The plough is the most significant human invention of all. (Together with the spear of course ? which enables human beings to kill at a distance!). I thought about your question and came up with an answer right away, but I am not sure if my answer is suitable. For one thing, I don't know if it really refers to an invention of the last two thousand years. Most likely there were many people who thought about it before the year 2 BCE, and we may well have documentary evidence of that, although there might easily have been discoverers who were afraid to discuss it publicly. In any case, the most important invention I