In Yuval Noah Hararis's excellent book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, he charts out how our species came to be the most dominant living force on the planet. The key, he writes, was the transformation of human beings from hunter-gatherers to farmers. When we were hunter-gatherers, the world was our oyster since we were free to roam as we pleased without any notion of one place being home. But once the agricultural revolution took place and we started farming, we started building settlements for small groups of people.

We started tilling the land and devised ways to keep out all sorts of intruders, including animals, pests and rival human groups. This later led to the formation of towns, cities and kingdoms till, millions of year later, we eventually reached the stage we are in at present. Farming and creating settlements thus lies at the root of our social existence.