From about twenty five million years ago Earth’s climate cooled and became more seasonal. This culminated in the series of pulse-like ice advances and retreats that have marked the last two million years. Cooling climate constrained the evolution of hominids and their spread around the world. Plant and animal domestication appears to be a feature of the present interglacial, the Holocene. Did people develop agriculture as a response to the pronounced climate change at the end of the Pleistocene or were other influences involved? What were the consequences?