The 'Neolithic Revolution' is the term for the 'first agricultural revolution', describing the transition from nomadic
hunting and gathering communitiadsnds, to
agriculture and settlement, as first adopted by various independent prehistoric
human societies, in numerous locations on most continents between 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 and crop cultivation - the
domestication of plants and animals. The first agricultural revolution introduced dramatic social changes, including a dramatic increasing
population density, specialization in non-agricultural
crafts, such as clay figurine making, basic and artistic furniture skills;
barter and
trade; the organization of
hierarchical society; the introduction of
slavery;
armies; the
state, official religions; official
marriage; the move from overwhelming
matriarchal life to
patriarchal life; and personal
inheritance. This revolution marked a dramatic expansion of human "control" over
nature and of humans over humans.
In particular, in opposition to the carryable
personal property and communal property of the
nomadic hunter-gatherer, a new way of life began that introduced
private property, private ownership of land and buildings, valuable artifacts (and later accumulated
money) - a private ownership system protected by the
state that allowed one man to have control over the livelihoods of others. Systemic
slavery also emerged in human evolution in this period, in almost all continents, where captured humans were considered as "things", the private property of wealthy individuals and families. The walled town of
Jericho was established almost 12,000 years ago, in which captured hunter-gatherers were enslaved.
it went from hunting and gat
Richard Leakey and
Roger Lewin, in their book ''Origins'', explain the human transition from cooperative and sharing communities, to agricultural settlement:
"Why then, is recent human history characterised by conflict rather than compassion? We suggest that the answer to this question lies in the change in way of life from hunting and gathering to farming, a change which began about ten thousand years ago and which involved a dramatic alteration in the relationship people had both with the world around them and among themselves. The hunter-gatherer is part of the natural order: a farmer necessarily distorts that order. But more important, sedentary farming communities have the opportunity to accumulate possessions, and having done so they must protect them. This is the key to human conflict, and it is greatly exaggerated in the highly materialistic world we now live in."
The
hunter-gatherer way of life was replaced by domestication of
crops and
animals, enabling people to live more
sedentary lives. Permanent settlements arose, creating new
social,
cultural,
economic, and
political institutions. At first, agriculture was usually
subsistence agriculture: people farmed for their own
subsistence (not for sale or profit), and farmers practiced
crop rotation (letting fields lie fallow between planting seasons). The need to leave fields in fallow sometimes lead to
shifting cultivation, discouraging a strongly fixed sedentary lifestyle.
Slash and burn methods of agriculture were closely linked to shifting cultivation, especially on the frontiers of agriculture where fire not only cleared the land for crops but could act as a temporary fertilizer. Similarly, the domestication of grazing animals like sheep and goat encouraged the use of fire to convert forest land into pasture.
[1]
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, alterations to social hierarchies, 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 deliberate 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 approximately 25,000 years ago in
Melanesia to
2,500 BC in
Sub-Saharan 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.
Incentive to settle
Hunter-gatherer lifestyles are the product of the
depletion of the biological potential of a specific location, either through localised overhunting or over gathering, and lead to a movement to a new area where game and foodstuffs are not depleted, allowing the earlier ranges to recover. If sufficient foodstuffs can be gathered on a permanent basis from a specific locality, there is little incentive to move and permanent settlement may result. This will happen whenever local
biological productivity is sufficient to permit permanent settlement.
Having a plentiful supply of
basic food does not mean that depletion of important gathered vegetable products does not occur. But a settled population permits year-round observation of the growing cycle, and hunter-gatherers are keen observers of the environmental conditions optimal for specific plant products.
Domestication of plants
Once agriculture started gaining momentum, humans were unknowingly
altering the genetic make-up of certain cereal grasses (beginning with
emmer,
einkorn and barley), and not simply those that would favour greater caloric returns through larger seeds. 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.
[2] Wild lentils present a different challenge that needed to be overcome: most of the wild seeds do not 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[3]
This process of
domestication allowed the founder crops to adapt and eventually become larger, more easily harvested, more dependable in storage and more useful to the human population.
Barley and, most likely, oats, were cultivated in the Jordan Valley, represented by the early Neolithic site of
Gilgal, where in 2006 archaeologists found caches of seeds of each in quantities too large to be accounted for even by
intensive gathering, at strata dateable c. 11000 years ago. Some of the plants tried and then abandoned during the Neolithic period in the Ancient Near East, at sites like Gilgal, were later successfully domesticated in other parts of the world.
Once early farmers perfected their agricultural techniques, their crops would
yield surpluses which needed storage. Most hunter gatherers could not easily store food for long due to their migratory lifestyle, whereas those with a sedentary dwelling could store their surplus grain. Eventually
granaries were developed that allowed villages to store their seeds for longer periods of time. So with more food, the population expanded and communities developed specialized workers and more advanced tools.
The process was not as linear as was once thought, but a more complicated effort, which was undertaken by different human populations in different regions.
Agriculture in Asia
The Neolithic Revolution is believed to have become widespread in southwest
Asia around
8000 BC–
7000 BC, though earlier individual sites have been identified. Although archaeological evidence provides scant evidence as to which of the genders performed what task in Neolithic cultures, by comparison with historical and contemporary hunter-gatherer communities it is generally supposed that hunting was typically performed by the men, whereas women had a more significant role in the gathering. By extension, it may be theorised that women were largely responsible for the observations and initial activities which began the Neolithic Revolution, insofar as the gradual selection and refinement of edible plant species was concerned.
The precise nature of these initial observations and (later) purposeful activities which would give rise to the changes in
subsistence methods brought about by the Neolithic Revolution are not known; specific evidence is lacking. However, several reasonable speculations have been put forward; for example, it might be expected that the common practice of discarding food refuse in
middens would result in the regrowth of plants from the discarded seeds in the (
fertilizer-enriched) soils. In all likelihood, there were a number of factors which contributed to the early onset of agriculture in Neolithic
human societies.
Agriculture in the Fertile Crescent
Generalised agriculture apparently first arose in the
Fertile Crescent because of many factors. The
Mediterranean climate has a long, dry season with a short period of rain, which made it suitable for small plants with large seeds, like wheat and barley. These were the most suitable for domestication because of the ease of harvest and storage and the wide availability. In addition, the domesticated plants had especially high
protein content. The Fertile Crescent had a large area of varied geographical settings and altitudes. The variety given made agriculture more profitable for former hunter-gatherers. Other areas with a similar climate were less suitable for agriculture because of the lack of geographic variation within the region and the lack of availability of plants for domestication.
Agriculture in Africa
The Revolution developed independently in different parts of the world, not just in the Fertile Crescent. On the African continent, three areas have been identified as independently developing agriculture: the
Ethiopian highlands, the
Nile River Valley and
West Africa. In East Africa we know that there was a lot of water to complete the neolithic life.
Prof. Fred Wendorf and Dr. Romuald Schild, of the Department of Anthropology at Southern Methodist University, have evidence of early agriculture in Upper Paleolithic times at
Wadi Kubbaniya, on the
Kom Ombos plateau, of Egypt, including a mortar and pestle, grinding stones, several harvesting implements and charred wheat and barley grains - which may have been introduced from outside the region. Carbon-14 dates range from 15,000 to 16,300 BC, showing that this early grain harvesting preceded that of the Middle East by about 5,000 years.
The archaeologists state that "These are not the only Late
Paleolithic sites which have been discovered in Egypt along the Nile, nor are they alone in containing stone artifact assemblages which seem to indicate the harvesting of grain. Among others are several sites at Wadi Tushka, near Abu Simbel, at Kom Ombo, north of Aswan, and a third group (a whole series of sites) near Esna. All these are in the Nile Valley." The Egyptian Esna culture shows "extensive use of cereals," date from 13,000 to 14,500 years ago.
They continue: "While the flaked stone industries from them are different from those found at Kubbaniya, the Tushka site yielded several pieces of stone with lustrous edges, indicating that they were used as sickles in harvesting grain."
Many such grinding stones are found with the early Egyptian
Sebilian and
Mechian cultures dating 10,000-13,000 BC. Smith writes: "With the benefit of hindsight we can now see that many Late
Paleolithic peoples in the Old World were poised on the brink of plant cultivation and animal husbandry as an alternative to the hunter-gatherer's way of life". Unlike the Middle East, this evidence appears as a "false dawn" to agriculture, as the sites were later abandoned, and permanent farming then was delayed until 4,500 BC with the
Tasian and
Badarian cultures and the arrival of crops and animals from the Near East.
Domestication of animals
When hunter-gathering began to be replaced by sedentary food production it became more profitable to keep animals close at hand. Therefore, it became necessary to bring animals permanently to their settlements, although in many cases there was a distinction between relatively sedentary farmers and nomadic herders. The animals' size, temperament, diet, mating patterns, and life span were factors in the desire and success in domesticating animals. Animals that provided milk, such as cows and goats, offered a source of protein that was renewable and therefore quite valuable. The animal’s ability as a worker (for example ploughing or towing), as well as a food source, also had to be taken into account. Besides being a direct source of food, certain animals could provide leather, wool, hides, and fertilizer. Some of the earliest domesticated animals included sheep, goats, cows, and pigs. Out of the thousands of species of animals only
fourteen eventually became domesticated for agricultural purposes.
Domestication of animals in the Middle East
The Middle East served as the source for many domesticable animals, such as
goats and
pigs. This area was also the first region to domesticate the
Dromedary Camel. The presence of these animals gave the region a large advantage in cultural and economic development. As the climate in the Middle East changed, and became drier, many of the farmers were forced to leave, taking their domesticated animals with them. It was this massive emigration from the Middle East that would later help distribute these animals to the rest of Afroeurasia. This emigration was mainly on an est-west axis of similar climates, as crops usually have a narrow optimal climatic range outside of which they cannot grow for reasons of light or rain changes. For instance,
wheat does not normally grow in
tropical climates, just like tropical crops such as
bananas do not grow in colder climates (until modern technology allowed heated greenhouses). Some authors like
Jared Diamond postulated that this East-West axis is the main reason why plant and animal domestication spread so quickly from the
Fertile Crescent to
Europe and
China, while it did not reach through the North-South axis of
Africa to reach the mediterranean climates of
South Africa, where temperate crops were successfully imported by ships in the last 500 years. The African
Zebu is a separate breed of cattle that was better suited to the hotter climates of central Africa than the fertile-crescent domesticated bovines. North and South America where similarly separated by the narrow tropical
Isthmus of Panama, that prevented the andes
Lama to be exported to the
Mexican plateau.
Domestication of animals in China's Yellow River valley
The agricultural revolution was inspired, in part, by the spreading of domesticated plants and animals and the growth of complex societies. The first occurrences of plant and animal domestication are apparently independent in China’s
Yellow River Valley (
pig,
horse) and the fertile crescent (
cattle,
domestic goat), before it spread to the rest of
Eurasia. Along the same latitudes it was easy for agricultural methods to be adopted by neighbouring communities, because plants would grow well in similar climates. Either the neighbouring hunter-gathers adopted these new methods or they were displaced. The change to the agrarian way of life lead to more developed technology, organized society, and increased populations which required sedentary lifestyles to spread. Therefore the indigenous hunter-gatherers either adapted to this new way of life or were gradually displaced, sometimes remaining as
nomad cultures such as the
mongols.
Causes of the Neolithic Revolution
Harlan, examining the causes for the Neolithic Revolution, suggests 6 principal reasons which can be summarised to 3 principal categories:
#Domestication for religious reasons
#Domestication by crowding and as a consequence of stress
#Domestication resulting from discovery, based upon the perceptions of food gatherers
With regard to the first explanation,
Ian Hodder, who directs the excavations at
Çatalhöyük, has suggested that the earliest settled communities, and the Neolithic revolution they represent, actually ''preceded'' the development of agriculture. He has been developing the ideas first expressed by
Jacques Cauvin, the excavator of the
Natufian settlement at
Mureybet in northern Syria. Hodder believes that the Neolithic revolution was the result of a revolutionary change in the human psychology, a "revolution of symbols" which led to new beliefs about the world and shared community rituals embodied in corpulent female figurines and the methodical assembly of
aurochs horns.
An alternative explanation for the origin of agriculture is propounded by
Mark Nathan Cohen. Cohen believes that following the widespread extinctions of large mammals in the late Palaeolithic, the human population had expanded to the limits of the available territory and a population explosion led to a food crisis. Agriculture was the only way in which it was possible to support the increasing population on the available area of land. This view has come under criticism due to the obvious problem of how a population explosion would occur without already having a surplus of food. The people doing the reproducing would need food, at the very least, from birth to reproduction age.
Food gatherers (not the hunters) caring for children, keeping the fires alive, foraging near the base camp; led the way in developing language and culture, in knowledge of plants and increasingly semi-domesticated animals who travelled with the nomads from camp to camp. It is ironic that these women laid the foundation for a new type of society that replaced the rough egalitarianism of hunter-gatherer communal life - with systemic patriarchal forms of rule.
Consequences of the Neolithic Revolution
Social change
It is often argued that agriculture gave humans more control over their food supply, but this has been disputed by the finding that nutritional standards of Neolithic populations were generally inferior to that of hunter gatherers, and life expectancy may in fact have been shorter (see "Disease" below). In actual fact, by reducing the necessity for the carrying of children, Neolithic societies had a major impact upon the spacing of children (carrying more than one child at a time is impossible for hunter-gatherers, which leads to children being spaced four or more years apart). This increase in the
birth rate was required to offset increases in
death rates and required settled occupation of territory and encouraged larger social groups. These sedentary groups were able to reproduce at a faster rate due to the possibilities of sharing the raising of children in such societies. The children accounted for a denser population, and encouraged the introduction of specialization by providing diverse forms of new labor. The development of larger societies called for different means of decision making and led to governmental organization. Food surpluses made possible the development of a social elite who were not otherwise engaged in agriculture, industry or commerce, but dominated their communities by other means and monopolized decision making
Disease
Throughout the development of sedentary societies, disease spread more rapidly than it had during time in which hunter-gatherer societies existed. Inadequate sanitary practices and the domestication of animals may explain the rise in deaths and sickness during the Neolithic Revolution from disease, as diseases jumped from the animal to the human population. Some examples of diseases spread from animals to humans are
influenza,
smallpox, and
measles.
In concordance with a process of
natural selection, the humans who first domesticated the big
mammals quickly built up immunities to the diseases as within each generation the individuals with better immunities had better chances of survival. In their approximately 10,000 years of shared proximity with animals, Europeans, Chinese and Africans became more resistant to those diseases compared with the indigenous populations encountered outside
Eurasia and
Africa. For instance, the population of most
Caribbean and several
Pacific Islands have been completely wiped out by diseases. According to the
Population history of American indigenous peoples, 90% of the population of certain regions of North and South America were wiped out long before any European set foot within sight of entire civilisations like the Mississippi river cultures. Some cultures like the
Inca Empire did have one big mammal domesticated, the
Llama, but the inca did not drink its milk or live in a closed space with their herds, hence limiting the risk of contagion.
In recent years, close proximity with different 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 flu.
Subsequent revolutions
Andrew Sherrat has argued that following upon the Neolithic Revolution was a second phase of discovery that he refers to as the
secondary products revolution. Animals, it appears were first domesticated purely as a source of meat. The Secondary Products Revolution occurred when it was recognised that animals also provided a number of other useful products. These included:
★ hides and skins (from all domesticated animals)
★ manure for soil conditioning (from all domesticated animals)
★ wool (from
sheep,
llama,
alpaca and
Angora goats)
★ milk (from
goats,
cattle,
yaks,
sheep,
horses and
camels)
★ traction (from
oxen,
buffalo,
onagers,
donkeys,
horses and
camels)
Sherrat argues that this phase in agricultural development enabled humans to make use of the energy possibilities of their animals in new ways, and permitted permanent intensive subsistence farming and crop production, and the opening up heavier soils for farming. It also made possible
nomadic pastoralism in semi arid areas, along the margins of
deserts, and eventually led to the domestication of both the
Baktrian and
Dromedary camel. Overgrazing of these areas, particularly by herds of goats, greatly extended the areal extent of deserts.
Living in one spot would have more easily permitted the accrual of personal possessions and an attachment to certain areas of land. From such a position, it is argued, prehistoric people were able to stockpile food to survive lean times and trade unwanted surpluses with others. Once
trade and a secure food supply were established, populations could grow, and society would have diversified into food producers and artisans, who could afford to develop their trade by virtue of the free time they enjoyed because of a surplus of food. The artisans, in turn, were able to develop technology such as metal weapons. Such relative complexity would have required some form of social organisation to work efficiently and so it is likely that populations which had such organisation, perhaps such as that provided by
religion were better prepared and more successful. In addition, the denser populations could form and support legions of professional soldiers. Also, during this time property ownership became increasingly important to all people. Ultimately, Childe argued that this growing social complexity, all rooted in the original decision to settle, led to a second
Urban Revolution in which the first cities were built.
The Age of Discovery
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 civilisations 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 had not 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.
See also
★
Çatalhöyük, a Neolithic site in southern Anatolia
★
Natufians, a settled culture preceding agriculture
★
Original affluent society
★
Haplogroup G (Y-DNA)
★
Haplogroup J (mtDNA)
★
Agricultural Revolution
References
1. The use of fire during the Neolithic Revolution from: Pyne, Stephen J. ''Vestal Fire: An Environmental History Told through Fire, of Europe and Europe's Encounter with the World''; University of Washington Press, Seattle; 1997. ISBN 0-295-97592-3
2. http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?apage=2&cid=1150355513473&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
3. http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?apage=1&cid=1150355513473&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
Further reading
★ Bailey, Douglass. (2000). ''Balkan Prehistory: Exclusions, Incorporation and Identity.'' Routledge Publishers. ISBN 0-415-21598-6.
★ Bailey, Douglass. (2005). ''Prehistoric Figurines: Representation and Corporeality in the Neolithic.'' Routledge Publishers. ISBN 0-415-33152-8.
★ Balter, Michael (2005). ''The Goddess and the Bull: Catalhoyuk, An Archaeological Journey to the Dawn of Civilization.'' New York: Free Press. ISBN 0-7432-4360-9.
★ Bellwood, Peter. (2004). ''First Farmers: The Origins of Agricultural Societies.'' Blackwell Publishers. ISBN 0-631-20566-7
★ Cohen, Mark Nathan (1977)''The Food Crisis in Prehistory: Overpopulation and the Origins of Agriculture.'' New Haven and London: Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-02016-3.
★ Diamond, Jared (1999). ''Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies.'' New York: Norton Press. ISBN 0-393-31755-2.
★ Diamond, Jared (2002) ''Evolution, Consequences and Future of Plant and Animal Domestication.'' Nature Magazine, Vol 418.
★ Harlan, Jack R. (1992) ''Crops & Man: Views on Agricultural Origins'' ASA, CSA, Madison, WI. http://www.hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/history/lecture03/r_3-1.html
★ Wright, Gary A. (1971) "Origins of Food Production in Southwestern Asia: A Survey of Ideas" Current Anthropology, Vol. 12, No. 4/5 (Oct - Dec., 1971) , pp. 447-477
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