Source: Arnold Toynbee (1970), Cities on the Move, Oxford University Press, p.247About eight thousand or perhaps ten thousand years ago, our ancestors transformed themselves from vagrant food-gatherers, hunters, and fishermen into sedentary tillers of the soil and breeders and sheperds of livestock. Their survival of this previous testing transformation is a precedent that offers us grounds for hope that we, in our turn, may be going to survive our own ordeal. ... Since our ancestors rose to the occasion, we, their decendents, are presumably capable of emulating them if we display the courage, vision, and inventiveness that were our ancestors salvation.
