Large-scale cultivation of the land, with resulting specialization of labor, domestication of plants and animals, identification with one’s sedentery social group, and a radical separation from the natural world. The Agricultural (Neolithic) Revolution began ten thousand years ago in the Fertile Crescent, where extensive irrigation turned once-fertile croplands into barren salt pans. (By some accounts, the now-denuded Zagros Mountains in western Iran hosted this revolution. "Zagros" is thought to derive from Zagreus, the Greek son of Zeus who was dismembered and eaten and later merged with Dionysus. ) Modern agriculture largely relies on keeping ecosystems in perpetually immature states of succession in which chemically stimulated productivity remains high until the soils are too depleted to grow anything.