Atlas
A trail is a short, ordered route through the atlas. Each stop says why it comes next, so a journey reads as an argument rather than a list. Start one, leave, and come back: your place is kept in this browser, and you do not need an account for that.
Eight stops through this wave's own research: the science of grazing land, the ancient practice of moving herds by season, an insect bred entirely out of the wild for its thread, two reactions against industrial...
8 stops
Agriculture's history is punctuated by its failures: a potato that rotted, a vine that died, granaries emptied by policy rather than weather. Eight stops through what famine and blight taught the world, ending with the...
8 stops
Ten thousand years of feeding ourselves in eight stops: a flint blade older than farming, the grass that became bread, the revolutions that remade the field, and the Arctic mountain where the whole story is kept in...
8 stops
Ten animals, walked in the order farming first tamed each one: sheep and goats from the deep Neolithic, the horse that broke the prairie, the bee that was never quite domesticated at all, and the turkey that crossed the...
10 stops
Five staple crops carried across the Atlantic after 1492, three of them newly filled in by this wave: the familiar New World grain that fed the Old World, the tuber whose own pre-Columbian journey is still debated, the...
6 stops
Trails are curated by the atlas. Where you have got to in one is remembered by your own browser and is never sent to us.