Everything about the Neolithic Revolution totally explained
The
Neolithic Revolution was the first
agricultural revolution—the transition from nomadic
hunting and gathering communities and bands, to
agriculture and settlement. It occurred in various independent prehistoric
human societies 10–12 thousand years ago.
The term refers to both the general time period over which these initial developments took place and the subsequent changes to
Neolithic human societies which either resulted from, or are associated with, the adoption of early
farming techniques, crop cultivation, and the
domestication of animals.
The Neolithic Revolution is notable primarily for developments in social organization and technology. The changes most often associated with the Neolithic Revolution include an increased tendency to live in permanent or semi-permanent
settlements, a corresponding reduction in
nomadic lifestyles, the concept of land ownership, modifications to the
natural environment, the ability to sustain higher
population densities, an increased reliance on
vegetable and
cereal foods in the total
diet, a less egalitarian society, nascent "
trading economies" using surplus production from increasing
crop yields, and the development of new technologies. The relationship of these characteristics to the onset of agriculture, to each other, their sequence and even whether some of these changes are supported by the available evidence remains the subject of much academic debate, and seems to vary from place to place.
Agricultural transition
The term
Neolithic Revolution was first coined in the 1920s by
Vere Gordon Childe to describe the first in a series of
agricultural revolutions to have occurred in Middle Eastern history. This period is described as a "revolution" to denote its importance, and the great significance and degree of change brought about to the communities in which these practices were gradually adopted and refined.
This involved a gradual transition from a
hunter-gatherer mode of subsistence which was practiced by all earlier human societies, to one based more upon the nurturing and cultivation of
crops for the purpose of
food production. Evidence for the first beginnings of this process obtained from different regions dated from perhaps 10,000 years ago in
Melanesia to 2,500 BC in
Subsaharan Africa, with some considering the events of 9000-7000
BC in the
Fertile Crescent to be the most important. This transition everywhere seems associated with a change from a largely
nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle to a more
settled,
agrarian-based one, with the onset of the
domestication of plants and of a number of animals.
There are several competing theories as to what drove populations to take up agriculture. These are
- The Oasis Theory which was original proposed by Raphael Pumpelly in 1908, but popularized by Vere Gordon Childe in 1928 and summarised in Childe's book Man Makes Himself. This theory maintains that as the climate got drier, communities contracted to oases where they were forced into close association with animals which were then domesticated together with planting of seeds. It has little support now as the climate data for the time doesn't support the theory.
- The Hilly Flanks hypothesis. Proposed by Robert Braidwood in 1948, it suggests that agriculture began in the hilly flanks of the Taurus and Zagros mountains, and that it developed from intensive focused grain gathering in the region.
- The Feasting model by Brian Hayden suggests that agriculture was driven by ostentatious displays of power, such as throwing feasts to exert dominance. This required assembling large quantities of food which drove agricultural technology.
- The Demographic theories proposed by Carl Sauer and adapted by Lewis Binford and Kent Flannery. This leads from an increasingly sedentary population, expanding up to the carrying capacity of the local environment, and requiring more food than can be gathered. Various social and economic factors help drive the need for food.
- The evolutionary/intentionality theory. As proposed by those such as David Rindos the idea that agriculture is an evolutionary adaptation of plants and humans. Starting with domestication by protection of wild plants, followed specialisation of location and then domestication.
Unlike the Paleolithic, in which more than one human species existed, only one human species (Homo sapiens) reached the Neolithic.
Domestication of plants
Once agriculture started gaining momentum, cereal grasses (beginning with
emmer,
einkorn and barley), and not simply those that would favour greater caloric returns through larger seeds, were selectively bred. Plants that possessed traits such as small seeds or bitter taste would have been seen as undesirable. Plants that rapidly shed their seeds on maturity tended not to be gathered at harvest, thus not stored and not seeded the following season; years of harvesting selected for strains that retained their edible seeds longer. Several plant species, the "pioneer crops" or
Neolithic founder crops, were the earliest plants successfully manipulated by humans. Some of these pioneering attempts failed at first and crops were abandoned, sometimes to be taken up again and successfully domesticated thousands of years later:
rye, tried and abandoned in Neolithic
Anatolia, made its way to Europe as weed seeds and was successfully domesticated in Europe, thousands of years after the earliest agriculture. Wild lentils present a different challenge that needed to be overcome: most of the wild seeds don't germinate in the first year; the first evidence of lentil domestication, breaking dormancy in their first year, was found in the early Neolithic at Jerf el-Ahmar, (in modern Syria), and quickly spread south to the
Netiv Hagdud site in the
Jordan Valley.
In recent years, proximity with different domesticated animals in certain parts of south-east Asia and China is also a highly potent source of diseases like the common
flu,
SARS or the possible transmission to humans of the
avian influenza. The source of many other recent diseases has been traced to wild animals for example non-human
primates in the case of
ebola and
HIV/AIDS.
Technology
In his book
Guns, Germs, and Steel,
Jared Diamond argues that Europeans and East Asians benefited from an advantageous geographical location which afforded them a head start in the Neolithic Revolution. Both shared the temperate climate ideal for the first agricultural settings, both were near a number of easily
domesticable plant and animal species, and both were safer from attacks of other people than civilizations in the middle part of the Eurasian continent. Being among the first to adopt agriculture and sedentary lifestyles, and neighboring other early agricultural societies with whom they could compete and trade, both Europeans and East Asians were also among the first to benefit from technologies such as
firearms and steel
swords. In addition, they developed resistances to
infectious disease, such as
smallpox, due to their close relationship with domesticated animals. Groups of people who hadn't lived in proximity with other large
mammals, such as the
Australian Aborigines and
American indigenous peoples were more vulnerable to infection and largely wiped out by diseases.
During and after the
Age of Discovery, European explorers, such as the Spanish
conquistadors, encountered other groups of people which had never or only recently adopted agriculture, such as in the
Pacific Islands, or lacked domesticated big mammals such as the highlands people of
Papua New Guinea. Due in part to their head start in the Neolithic Revolution, the Europeans were able to use their technology and
endemic diseases, to which indigenous populations had never been exposed, to colonize most of the globe.
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