essay on neolithic revolution

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Neolithic Revolution

By: History.com Editors

Updated: October 4, 2023 | Original: January 12, 2018

The Neolithic Revolution, also called the Agricultural Revolution, marked the transition in human history from small, nomadic bands of hunter-gatherers to larger, agricultural settlements and early civilization. The Neolithic Revolution started around 10,000 B.C. in the Fertile Crescent, a boomerang-shaped region of the Middle East where humans first took up farming. Shortly after, Stone Age humans in other parts of the world also began to practice agriculture. Civilizations and cities grew out of the innovations of the Neolithic Revolution.

Neolithic Age

The Neolithic Age is sometimes called the New Stone Age . Neolithic humans used stone tools like their earlier Stone Age ancestors, who eked out a marginal existence in small bands of hunter-gatherers during the last Ice Age .

Australian archaeologist V. Gordon Childe coined the term “Neolithic Revolution” in 1935 to describe the radical and important period of change in which humans began cultivating plants, breeding animals for food and forming permanent settlements. The advent of agriculture separated Neolithic people from their Paleolithic ancestors.

Many facets of modern civilization can be traced to this moment in history when people started living together in communities.

Causes of the Neolithic Revolution

There was no single factor that led humans to begin farming roughly 12,000 years ago. The causes of the Neolithic Revolution may have varied from region to region.

The Earth entered a warming trend around 14,000 years ago at the end of the last Ice Age. Some scientists theorize that climate changes drove the Agricultural Revolution.

In the Fertile Crescent , bounded on the west by the Mediterranean Sea and on the east by the Persian Gulf, wild wheat and barley began to grow as it got warmer. Pre-Neolithic people called Natufians started building permanent houses in the region.

Other scientists suggest that intellectual advances in the human brain may have caused people to settle down. Religious artifacts and artistic imagery—progenitors of human civilization—have been uncovered at the earliest Neolithic settlements.

The Neolithic Era began when some groups of humans gave up the nomadic, hunter-gatherer lifestyle completely to begin farming. It may have taken humans hundreds or even thousands of years to transition fully from a lifestyle of subsisting on wild plants to keeping small gardens and later tending large crop fields.

Neolithic Humans

The archaeological site of Çatalhöyük in southern Turkey is one of the best-preserved Neolithic settlements. Studying Çatalhöyük has given researchers a better understanding of the transition from a nomadic life of hunting and gathering to an agriculture lifestyle.

Archaeologists have unearthed more than a dozen mud-brick dwellings at the 9,500 year-old Çatalhöyük. They estimate that as many as 8,000 people may have lived here at one time. The houses were clustered so closely back-to-back that residents had to enter the homes through a hole in the roof.

The inhabitants of Çatalhöyük appear to have valued art and spirituality. They buried their dead under the floors of their houses. The walls of the homes are covered with murals of men hunting, cattle and female goddesses .

Some of the earliest evidence of farming comes from the archaeological site of Tell Abu Hureyra, a small village located along the Euphrates River in modern Syria . The village was inhabited from roughly 11,500 to 7,000 B.C.

Inhabitants of Tell Abu Hureyra initially hunted gazelle and other game. Around 9,700 B.C. they began to harvest wild grains. Several large stone tools for grinding grain have been found at the site.

Agricultural Inventions

Plant domestication: Cereals such as emmer wheat, einkorn wheat and barley were among the first crops domesticated by Neolithic farming communities in the Fertile Crescent. These early farmers also domesticated lentils, chickpeas, peas and flax.

Domestication is the process by which farmers select for desirable traits by breeding successive generations of a plant or animal. Over time, a domestic species becomes different from its wild relative.

Neolithic farmers selected for crops that harvested easily. Wild wheat, for instance, falls to the ground and shatters when it is ripe. Early humans bred for wheat that stayed on the stem for easier harvesting.

Around the same time that farmers were beginning to sow wheat in the Fertile Crescent, people in Asia started to grow rice and millet. Scientists have discovered archaeological remnants of Stone Age rice paddies in Chinese swamps dating back at least 7,700 years.

In Mexico , squash cultivation began about 10,000 years ago, while maize-like crops emerged around 9,000 years ago.

Livestock : The first livestock were domesticated from animals that Neolithic humans hunted for meat. Domestic pigs were bred from wild boars, for instance, while goats came from the Persian ibex. Domesticated animals made the hard, physical labor of farming possible while their milk and meat added variety to the human diet. They also carried infectious diseases: smallpox, influenza and the measles all spread from domesticated animals to humans.

The first farm animals also included sheep and cattle. These originated in Mesopotamia between 10,000 and 13,000 years ago. Water buffalo and yak were domesticated shortly after in China , India and Tibet.

Draft animals including oxen, donkeys and camels appeared much later—around 4,000 B.C.—as humans developed trade routes for transporting goods.

Effects of the Neolithic Revolution

The Neolithic Revolution led to masses of people establishing permanent settlements supported by farming and agriculture. It paved the way for the innovations of the ensuing Bronze Age and Iron Age , when advancements in creating tools for farming, wars and art swept the world and brought civilizations together through trade and conquest.

The Development of Agriculture; National Geographic . The Seeds of Civilization; Smithsonian Magazine .

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Neolithic Revolution Essay

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Introduction

Causes of neolithic revolution, consequences, works cited.

Neolithic revolution refers to an agricultural revolution that occurred between 8,000 and 5,000 BC, during which period the human way of life was transformed from historically practices that predominantly involved hunting and gathering to a form of agriculture that involved cultivation of crops and domestication of animals (Watkins).

Because Neolithic revolution finally led to a more established agricultural farming among inhabitants it eventually led to three major developments in the ways of life of the people, i.e. economically, socially and politically. These immediate outcomes of the Neolithic revolution are the main points of discussions that are going to be the major focus of this paper.

As early as 8,000 BC in events that were taking place in Melansia, the first efforts by man to practice agrarian based farming started taking place leading to the earliest recorded events where man was deliberately moving from nomadic way of living through hunting and gathering (Watkins). Over the next three thousand years or so this shift from nomadic way of life started taking place in many regions of the world spontaneously such as in Sub-saharan Africa and Asia among others.

The factors that are mostly attributed to this shift of way of life are many and varied and include change in climate, change in culture, population increase and natural evolution. One of the theories that attribute Neolithic revolution to climate change is referred as Oasis theory which claims that dry climate resulted in people settling around available sources of water (Watkins.

It is from here that they started taking the first initiative of farming and domesticating animals thereby departing from nomadic way of life which had started to become unreliable. Other theories suggest that population increase forced the early world inhabitants to ditch nomadic way of life to more stable agriculture methods which could be relied to provide enough food for the ever increasing community size (Wright).

Natural evolution of both humans and plants which enabled man to domesticate plants and animals is also attributed to the Neolithic revolution. It is unclear what exactly might have triggered the Neolithic revolution but it is most probable that a combination of all these factors eventually led to settled form of agriculture that man continues to practice to this date.

There are three immediate impacts that Neolithic revolution had on the way of life to the early inhabitants; one, people started adopting permanent settlement as a result of the domesticated way of life. Two, there was rise of social classes occasioned by the need of the people to stay connected now that they were finally able to settle in one place and practice agriculture.

This is what led to social change because of the new social structures that are inherent in any community that get to live together. Finally, the two factors of social classes and settlements facilitated the early form of civilization among these communities that eventually led to political systems (Wright). The early economic practice that took place within a society setting was form of barter trade which can directly be attributed to agrarian based way of life.

Because community settlement led to specialization in various aspects of agriculture, the community members needed to invent ways that would enable them obtain what they didn’t grow or raise by trading what they had and it is from here that the economic practices starting taking shape. Lastly, the new social way of life that the community had adopted meant that the community had to develop laws and regulation that would ensure peaceful coexistent of all community members. This gradually led to structures of governance that formed that foundation of the political changes that eventually took place.

Watkins, J. Neolithic Revolution , 2003. Web.

Wright, G. Origins of Food Production in Southwestern Asia: A Survey of Ideas. Current Anthropology , 12:1 (1971): pp 447-477.

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Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Neolithic Revolution." July 24, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/neolithic-revolution/.

The Neolithic revolution

A settled life.

When people think of the Neolithic era, they often think of Stonehenge, the iconic image of this early time. Dating to approximately 3000 B.C.E. and set on Salisbury Plain in England, it is a structure larger and more complex than anything built before it in Europe. Stonehenge is an example of the cultural advances brought about by the Neolithic revolution—the most important development in human history. The way we live today, settled in homes, close to other people in towns and cities, protected by laws, eating food grown on farms, and with leisure time to learn, explore and invent is all a result of the Neolithic revolution, which occurred approximately 11,500–5,000 years ago. The revolution which led to our way of life was the development of the technology needed to plant and harvest crops and to domesticate animals.

Before the Neolithic revolution, it’s likely you would have lived with your extended family as a nomad, never staying anywhere for more than a few months, always living in temporary shelters, always searching for food and never owning anything you couldn’t easily pack in a pocket or a sack. The change to the Neolithic way of life was huge and led to many of the pleasures (lots of food, friends and a comfortable home) that we still enjoy today.

Stonehenge, c. 3,000 B.C.E., Salisbury Plain, England

Neolithic art

The massive changes in the way people lived also changed the types of art they made. Neolithic sculpture became bigger, in part, because people didn’t have to carry it around anymore; pottery became more widespread and was used to store food harvested from farms. Alcohol was first produced during this period and architecture, as well as its interior and exterior decoration, first appears. In short, people settled down and began to live in one place, year after year.

It seems very unlikely that Stonehenge could have been made by earlier, Paleolithic, nomads. It would have been a waste to invest so much time and energy building a monument in a place to which they might never return or might only return infrequently. After all, the effort to build it was extraordinary. Stonehenge is approximately 320 feet in circumference and the stones which compose the outer ring weigh as much as 50 tons; the small stones, weighing as much as 6 tons, were quarried from as far away as 450 miles. The use or meaning of Stonehenge is not clear, but the design, planning and execution could have only been carried out by a culture in which authority was unquestioned. Here is a culture that was able to rally hundreds of people to perform very hard work for extended periods of time. This is another characteristic of the Neolithic era.

Skulls with plaster and shell from the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B, 6,000-7,000 B.C.E., found at the Yiftah’el archaeological site in the Lower Galilee, Israel

Plastered skulls

The Neolithic period is also important because it is when we first find good evidence for religious practice, a perpetual inspiration for the fine arts. Perhaps most fascinating are the plaster skulls found around the area of the Levant, at six sites, including Jericho. At this time in the Neolithic, c. 7000–6,000 B.C.E., people were often buried under the floors of homes, and in some cases their skulls were removed and covered with plaster in order to create very life-like faces, complete with shells inset for eyes and paint to imitate hair and mustaches.

The traditional interpretation of these the skulls has been that they offered a means of preserving and worshiping male ancestors. However, recent research has shown that among the sixty-one plastered skulls that have been found, there is a generous number that come from the bodies of women and children. Perhaps the skulls are not so much religious objects but rather powerful images made to aid in mourning lost loved ones.

Neolithic peoples didn’t have written language, so we may never know what their creators intended.  (The earliest example of writing develops in Sumer in Mesopotamia in the late 4th millennium B.C.E. However, there are scholars that believe that earlier proto-writing developed during the Neolithic period).

Bibliography

Stonehenge (English Heritage site)

Who built Stonehenge? (English Heritage video)

Stonehenge: Clues to the past (English Heritage video)

Creating an Ancestor: The Jericho Skull at the British Museum

History of Stonehenge (BBC)

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What Was the Neolithic Revolution, and How Did It Change Human Societies?

The neolithic revolution helped lay the foundation for what we are today. find out what the neolithic revolution was and how it encouraged the growth of civilization..

Before the Neolithic Revolution, around 12,000 years ago,  Homo sapiens  lived scattered about the world in small groups, mostly with their extended families. They hunted, gathered and moved around, living in temporary shelters.

They had to follow the food because they didn’t yet know how to grow their own. But gradually, over generations, agriculture began sprouting up across the globe, and the world began to change. Early  H. sapiens  could finally stay in one place because they cultivated their own food through agriculture and domesticating animals.

What Is the Neolithic Period?

The  Neolithic period , which is also called the New Stone Age, is one of the most important transitions in human society. It’s what later brought us together in towns and cities.

When great minds come together, they develop new ideas and great technology like stone tools, pottery and weaving. The less they traveled, the more they could use their minds, leading to great innovations. And none of it would have ever been possible without agriculture.

Read More: New Evidence Found for Stone Age Children, Thought Lost to Time

What Caused the Neolithic Revolution?

Archeologists think that the  warming climate  boosted the Neolithic Revolution, and as Earth began to thaw, it opened up the door to agriculture in places that were once frozen. While early humans might have already had the knowledge, they needed an extra push from the planet.

The  Levant , located in the Middle East in present-day Lebanon, Israel, Jordan and western Syria, is a great example. Here, we see one of the first settlements, likely even earlier, around 13,000 years ago. The climate was warming, and while people had not planted what we would today call agriculture,  changes were afoot .

Read More: 7 Groundbreaking Ancient Civilizations That Influence Us Today

How Did Agriculture Change the Life of Early Humans?

Though it’s called a revolution, the transition to agriculture was gradual. As humans lived on the land for millennia, they began understanding how plants grew and how animals reproduced. This allowed them to come back to the  same place again and again . 

People began gathering in groups of a few hundred, hunting and gathering wild wheat and barley. Over generations, these plants would spread their seeds and cultivate closer to where humans lived.  Soon, humans domesticated wild wheat,  and a few animals. 

Similar groups of humans were slowly transitioning in  other parts of the globe , across Turkey, Greece, Egypt and North Africa. 

Read More:  The 6 Most Iconic Artifacts From The Ancient World

How Did the Neolithic Revolution Encourage the Growth of Civilization?

As humans returned to the same place more often, temporary shelters turned into permanent structures, and from there, civilization was born. Gradually, people began to gather and live near one another. In time, groups became small farming communities in places like  Huang He , known as the Yellow River in China. Food staples of North America, like corn, beans and squash, led to the birth of civilizations in Mexico and Central America.

Humans did not write  during the Neolithic Period, but they still left traces of their culture behind in burial sites, tools, art and crafts. Toward the end of the epoch, around 5000 B.C., we start to see the first pieces of fine pottery found in central China. We also start to see the first jade carvings in China found in intricate jewelry like earrings, pendants and bracelets.

Read More: What Was Stonehenge Like Before It Was Built?

How Did the Neolithic Revolution Change Human Societies?

During the Neolithic Revolution, the more humans came together, the more they invented. The farming communities of the Neolithic period would soon give rise to the following Bronze Age dynasties, including the Sumerians, Babylonians and the Assyrians.

The Bronze Age would lead to the Iron Age in 1200 B.C. and the Roman Conquests that followed. By 200 B.C., the Romans had conquered Italy, North Africa, and much of the Middle East, building a society that is considered sophisticated even by today’s standards.

But none of these transitions would have ever occurred if humans were still scattered about the globe hunting and gathering. With the birth of a more sedentary lifestyle, humans had time for something other than their next meal. And when humans have time to think, man the ideas that we can come up with.

Read More: Why Did Stone and Bronze Age People Crack the Bones of Their Dead?

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Women harvest wheat with sickles in Tras os Monte, Portugal.

What was the Neolithic Revolution?

Also called the Agricultural Revolution, the shift to agriculture from hunting and gathering changed humanity forever.

The Neolithic Revolution—also referred to as the Agricultural Revolution—is thought to have begun about 12,000 years ago. It coincided with the end of the last ice age and the beginning of the current geological epoch, the Holocene . And it forever changed how humans live, eat, and interact, paving the way for modern civilization.

During the Neolithic period , hunter-gatherers roamed the natural world, foraging for their food. But then a dramatic shift occurred. The foragers became farmers, transitioning from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to a more settled one.

Why settle down?

Though the exact dates and reasons for the transition are debated, evidence of a move away from hunting and gathering and toward agriculture has been documented worldwide. Farming is thought to have happened first in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East, where multiple groups of people developed the practice independently . Thus, the “agricultural revolution” was likely a series of revolutions that occurred at different times in different places.

A farmer winnows grain in a field near the Pyramid of Meidum, in Egypt.

There are a variety of hypotheses as to why humans stopped foraging and started farming. Population pressure may have caused increased competition for food and the need to cultivate new foods; people may have shifted to farming in order to involve elders and children in food production; humans may have learned to depend on plants they modified in early domestication attempts and in turn, those plants may have become dependent on humans. With new technology come new and ever-evolving theories about how and why the agricultural revolution began.

Regardless of how and why humans began to move away from hunting and foraging, they continued to become more settled. This was in part due to their increasing domestication of plants. Humans are thought to have gathered plants and their seeds as early as 23,000 years ago , and to have started farming cereal grains like barley as early as 11,000 years ago. Afterward, they moved on to protein-rich foods like peas and lentils. As these early farmers became better at cultivating food, they may have produced surplus seeds and crops that required storage . This would have both spurred population growth because of more consistent food availability and required a more settled way of life with the need to store seeds and tend crops.

Animal domestication

As humans began to experiment with farming, they also started domesticating animals. Evidence of sheep and goat herding has been found in Iraq and Anatolia (modern-day Turkey) as far back as about 12,000 years ago. Domesticated animals, when used as labor, helped make more intensive farming possible and also provided additional nutrition via milk and meat for increasingly stable populations.

A man on a donkey leads sheep down a path in Syria.

The agricultural revolution had a variety of consequences for humans. It has been linked to everything from societal inequality —a result of humans’ increased dependence on the land and fears of scarcity—to a decline in nutrition and a rise in infectious diseases contracted from domesticated animals. But the new period also ushered in the potential for modern societies—civilizations characterized by large population centers, improved technology and advancements in knowledge, arts, and trade.

Related Topics

• SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE
• ANCIENT CIVILIZATIONS
• ANCIENT PERSIA

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2.3 The Neolithic Revolution

Learning objectives.

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Discuss the Neolithic Age
• Explain the consequences of the Neolithic Revolution
• Describe Neolithic settlements around the world and their significance

From the time Homo sapiens emerged and for tens of thousands of years afterward, members of the species lived a life of hunting and gathering, much as their distant ancestors had. Then, about twelve thousand years ago and for reasons that remain imperfectly understood, some modern human populations adopted agriculture . This means they transitioned away from existing on merely the sustenance nature provided. Instead, they began actively promoting the growth and eventual transformation of crops, and later the domestication of animals, to provide themselves with the resources they needed. This shift in strategy inaugurated the Neolithic Age .

The birth of agriculture triggered a host of additional changes in the way humans understood land, the way they organized socially, the amount and forms of wealth they could acquire, and even the religious traditions they practiced. Not everyone made the leap to farming, however. Plenty of hunter-gatherer societies avoided transitioning into a settled agricultural life, either because the new strategy wasn’t practicable in their environment or because for them the costs outweighed the benefits. Yet those groups that did become agriculturalists experienced a degree of population growth and labor specialization that ultimately allowed for the establishment of a number of sophisticated Neolithic settlements.

The Development of Agriculture

Possibly the most important transformation in the history of modern humans was the shift from hunting and gathering to a life based primarily on agriculture. We call this shift the Neolithic Revolution . But the revolution didn’t happen in just one place or at one time. Instead, it occurred independently at different times and in several different areas, including the Near East, China, sub-Saharan Africa, Mesoamerica, and South America.

Each region domesticated different types of plants. In the Near East it was grains like wheat and barley. In Mesoamerica it was squash and later maize, or corn, and in China millet and rice. These plants grew naturally in those areas and were gathered in their wild form for many thousands of years before they were cultivated deliberately. The shift to agriculture brought enormous transformations to human populations around the world. It made it possible to feed much larger groups, necessitated the abandonment of hunter-gatherer-style egalitarianism , prompted the domestication of animals, and ultimately made way for human civilization as we understand it.

The reason some human populations undertook this important evolution remains imperfectly understood. However, it’s likely not a coincidence that the earliest known adoptions of agriculture occurred not long after the end of the last ice age, about twelve thousand years ago. This climatic shift altered animal migration patterns and probably brought much drier conditions to places like the Near East, where we find the earliest evidence of plant domestication. Climate conditions may have put a strain on food resources and prompted a shift in survival strategy. For example, humans might have attempted to help edible plants grow by moving them to places where they didn’t grow before or had stopped growing. Populations already settled in one area might have begun to notice that seeds from the plants they were gathering would grow where they were left. Further observations likely prompted additional human interventions in order to produce more.

Beyond the Book

Göbekli tepe.

The archaeological site of Göbekli Tepe is located in what is now southeast Turkey near the Syrian border. It includes a number of large circular and rectangular structures, large T-shaped stone pillars, and numerous pieces of stone art depicting boars, snakes, birds, foxes, and other animals, made with both skill and care ( Figure 2.19 ). It has been known for several decades, but it was only in the 1990s that German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt began conducting extensive excavations and studies.

One of the most fascinating characteristics of Göbekli Tepe is that some of its earliest structures, built about 11,600 years ago, predate the domestication of agriculture. Indeed, the earliest evidence we have for agriculture at the site dates to about one thousand years later. Until this discovery was made, scholars assumed that agricultural production was a necessary prerequisite for megalithic architecture like that at Göbekli Tepe. The evidence here, however, led to an important reevaluation of our understanding of the Neolithic Revolution : What if settled communities and megalithic architecture led to agriculture, rather than the other way around?

Schmidt concluded that the site was a temple of sorts, where hunter-gatherer peoples from surrounding areas assembled at times to practice their religion and cooperate in building a stone site suitable for their religious purposes. Rather than religion and temple building emerging from agriculture, as had been commonly believed, Schmidt concluded that religion emerged first, and agriculture and the domestication of animals came later.

Since Schmidt published his findings, others working at the site have developed new and even more interesting conclusions. Discovering that Göbekli Tepe was actually a year-round settlement, archaeologist Lee Clare suggested that rather than bringing about agriculture, the people who built it may have been resisting it. The many carvings of animals at the site, he argued, might represent narrative connections to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle to which they were trying to cling as the world around them was embracing farming.

Both these conclusions challenge our earlier understanding of the Neolithic Revolution. And neither is likely to be the last word on what was happening at Göbekli Tepe.

• Which theory about Göbekli Tepe sounds more plausible to you? Why?
• Why might hunter-gatherer people take time to build a religious site? What does this suggest about the importance of religion for them?

Not all regions of the world had the right conditions in place to encourage a shift from hunting and gathering to settled agriculture. Among those regions that did, and where agriculture first flourished, were Mesopotamia , southern Turkey , and Israel . On a map, these places take the shape of a large crescent bending through the Near East. For this reason, the area is often referred to as the Fertile Crescent .

It was here that about twelve thousand years ago people began domesticating edible wild grasses to create what we know today as wheat and barley. Later, other species of plants were domesticated: peas, lentils, carrots, olives, and dates. Around ten thousand years ago, Asian peoples living on the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers began farming crops like rice, millet, and soybeans. In sub-Saharan Africa, likely around modern Sudan, people began actively cultivating sorghum, possibly as early as six thousand years ago. Over time they added crops like peanuts and sesame. Around the same time, groups living in central Mexico began cultivating maize (corn). Later they added crops like beans, squash, and peppers. Farther south, in the Andean region, around five thousand years ago people began to grow potatoes.

Each instance of the independent emergence of agriculture was followed by the expansion of these techniques to other areas. Wheat cultivation spread from the Fertile Crescent across the Mediterranean region and into northern Europe. Rice farming was adopted across large parts of eastern Asia where the crop would grow. Maize eventually expanded across Mesoamerica; in time, it reached as far north as the modern United States and as far south as the Andean region.

The key change brought by the rise of agriculture was not only that humans began to grow their own plants rather than just finding them where they grew naturally. It was also that humans, rather than their environment, became the deciding factor in determining which plants would grow. Since humans were selecting plants for their edible properties, their intervention led to gradual but important transformations in the plants themselves. For example, ancient wild varieties of wheat and barley had heavy husks around their edible seeds. These husks protected the seeds so that they could survive over the winter and sprout in the summer. But humans were primarily interested in the seeds, not the inedible husks. By selecting wheat and barley plants with thinner husks and more seeds year over year, humans transformed the plants over time into varieties of wheat and barley more suitable for their purposes. This domestication process occurred with numerous types of plants in different areas around the world.

The rise of agriculture also led to the domestication of numerous types of animals, often selected for characteristics that were beneficial to humans, such as docility, strength, ability to feed on readily available foods, and rapid growth and reproduction so the animals could be slaughtered for food. Some of the many animals domesticated in the Neolithic Age were sheep and goats in the Near East around ten thousand years ago, chickens in south Asia around eight thousand years ago, horses in central Asia around six thousand years ago, and llamas in Peru about the same time ( Figure 2.20 ).

While the advantages of plant and animal domestication seem obvious to us today, some groups either could not or simply did not adopt these practices. The Indigenous peoples of Australia , for example, lived in environments that would have supported agriculture, and some of them were in contact with groups from New Guinea that did farm crops like taro and yams. Yet the early Australians continued to practice a mostly hunter-gatherer lifestyle until Europeans arrived about two hundred and fifty years ago. They apparently consciously determined that hunting and gathering were more suitable and practical given their own needs and the environment in which they lived. This is just one example of a people choosing a means of survival apart from the Neolithic Revolution.

How Farming Changed the Human Experience

As the example of the Indigenous people of Australia proves, agriculture was not readily adopted by everyone exposed to it. This may seem strange to us, living in a world made possible by agriculture. But we’re largely removed from the sometimes-painful transition many of our distant ancestors made. Consider, for example, the loss in leisure time . Scholars who study modern hunter-gatherers have found that the time required to acquire enough food to live amounts to about twenty hours per week. However, comparable agricultural societies spend thirty or more hours engaged in farming. That means less time for resting, sharing knowledge, and undertaking activities that bring more joy than hard work does. These same studies have also noted that the greatest loss in leisure hours was borne by women, who spent far more time engaged in laborious tasks outside the home than hunter-gatherer women in similar environments.

Large groups living in agricultural communities were also more vulnerable to epidemic diseases , which became common in areas that collected large amounts of human and animal waste. They were far more dependent on the weather as well; their crops needed to receive the water they required but no more. Unlike hunter-gatherers, agriculturalists couldn’t easily migrate to areas with more suitable weather conditions. Farmers also had a less-diverse diet than hunter-gatherers, made up mostly of one or two staple crops, usually starchy carbohydrates. While domesticated animals were available to farmers, meat consumption among Neolithic communities was significantly lower than among hunter-gatherers. Relying on a limited variety of food sources could result in mineral and vitamin deficiencies. But the advantages are also plain to see. Agriculture allowed for much larger populations. That meant more workers producing more food and more people to defend the settlement. When functioning well, agriculture created a constant supply of food and even a surplus that could be stored.

As early humans left their hunter-gatherer existence behind beginning around twelve thousand years ago, they also drifted away from the egalitarianism it fostered because agriculture required labor specialization in a way that hunting and gathering did not. Farming a field of wheat, for example, required a family to devote their energy to that process and associated chores, leaving little time for the diversity of tasks common among hunter-gatherers. And as agriculture became more sophisticated, such as by incorporating plows and domesticated animals to pull them, some successful farmers were able to produce surpluses that allowed them to accumulate wealth in the form of material property and land. This wealth, and the higher social status that went with it, were left for their descendants to inherit, strengthening social divisions between the well-off and others. For example, if food was plentiful, not everyone needed to farm, allowing some to become artisans or traders, who generated more wealth.

Some people were able to specialize in ways that freed them entirely from the need to focus on food production. They became traders, stoneworkers, religious leaders, and other types of elites. Those who acquired considerable wealth became leaders with the authority to command armies and create rules for society. Those without wealth could expect a life of difficult toil if they were lucky, and a life of bondage if they were not. Within the social tiers made possible by the spread of agriculture, new divisions defined by sex emerged. Among hunter-gatherer societies, women commonly gathered while men commonly hunted. But in agricultural societies, it was the men who typically worked among the crops in the fields. The need for strength to control the plow was likely one of the factors that contributed to this development. Women were relegated to the domestic sphere and spent their time preparing food, making pottery, and weaving cloth. Being less tied to the home, men had opportunities for leadership in society that women did not. They also thus had responsibilities women did not, including dangerous duties like fighting and dying to defend the settlement.

At home, women undertook the difficult and time-consuming work of milling grains. Originally done simply with mortars and pestles, this task evolved along with the rise in agricultural production to include the use of larger stone tools. Operating these mills required many long hours kneeling on the ground and bending over the millstones. It was also in the home that wool sheared from domesticated sheep was spun into thread and woven into cloth. Such chores were in addition to the labor of giving birth, rearing children, and preparing food.

Agriculture also had a huge effect on religious practices. The division of labor and the increased specialization it brought allowed for the emergence of highly defined priestly classes in many places. These religious elites derived their authority from their ability to interpret the intentions of the supernatural world, a quality that was highly prized. As a result, they could control material and human resources, which were put to work constructing sometimes elaborate monuments and performing highly choreographed rituals. Religions themselves became more intricate as well as qualitatively different. Pre-agricultural societies had tended to practice varieties of animism , seeing elements of spirituality in a great many ordinary things and animals. They had a keen interest in communing with the supernatural, often through shamanic and other rituals. Communities that experienced the Neolithic Revolution, however, developed a focus on agricultural fertility and on deities who could intervene for humanity’s benefit by encouraging this fertility and perpetuating the important cycle of birth, death, and rebirth.

The Past Meets the Present

Domesticating humans.

The process of plant and animal domestication is often seen as a one-way street, with humans orchestrating the process while staying relatively unchanged. But it may also be the case that humans transformed, or domesticated, themselves in order to develop populations most suitable for the agricultural lifestyle. Some have argued that the adoption of agriculture encouraged humans to select and reproduce traits that would produce the most advantages, such as docility and cooperativeness. The fact that modern humans are far less aggressive and more cooperative than we were tens of thousands of years ago appears to support the conclusion that we adapted ourselves.

And as some such as Michael Pollan have suggested, edible plants themselves exerted pressures on us we didn’t quite recognize. Just over twelve thousand years ago, for example, wheat was merely one wild edible plant among many found in the Near East. Today it is grown around the world ( Figure 2.21 ). This incredible success was made possible by humans, who labored to remove rocks from the fields, bring water, remove insects, and work from dawn to dusk to ensure wheat’s survival and success. These costs borne by humans have redounded to the great benefit of wheat. Did we domesticate wheat, or did it domesticate us?

• How does the theory of human domestication affect your understanding of our relationship with agriculture?
• In what other ways do you think agriculture may have brought about human domestication?

Neolithic Peoples

By around nine thousand years ago, groups in a few different areas around the world were not only practicing agriculture but also beginning to establish large and complex permanent settlements. A number of these Neolithic settlements emerged in Europe, the Near East, China, Pakistan, and beyond. One of the largest to be excavated today is in southeastern Turkey, at a site known as Çatalhöyük (pronounced cha-tal-HOY-ook ). Evidence indicates this site was occupied for about twelve hundred years, roughly between 7200 and 6000 BCE. It covers more than thirty acres, and at its height it may have been home to as many as six thousand people.

Houses at Çatalhöyük were made with mud brick and were clustered together without roads or passages between them. This design required that residents enter their homes from the roof, but it provided them with protection from the outside world. Thanks to extensive excavation at the site, we can tell that the people who built and lived in Çatalhöyük included farmers, hunters, and skilled craftspeople with complex religious ideas. Their rooms include many examples of art, such as depictions of hunts and various kinds of animals, and even what may be representations of their myths, such as a woman giving birth to a bull. Cattle imagery abounds in Çatalhöyük, including bull heads with large horns and bull horns protruding from furniture, suggesting that the people who lived there venerated the animal ( Figure 2.22 ).

The people of Çatalhöyük lived a life that was neither fully agricultural nor hunter-gatherer. Instead, they combined the two strategies. They had domesticated animals like cattle; grew a variety of domesticated plants like wheat, lentils, and barley; and may even have used some form of irrigation system to increase agricultural production. Yet they also relied on hunting wild animals for meat and gathering wild edible plants like walnuts, various types of berries, pears, and crab apples. It seems clear that their wealth was derived from trade in agricultural products, woven items, clay vessels, and especially obsidian, a naturally occurring volcanic glass. Because it can be chipped to create a razor-sharp edge, obsidian would have been a highly valued trade item for people in need of effective tools for butchering and other chores. The obsidian of Çatalhöyük was obtained from a nearby volcano and traded to people as far away as Syria and Cyprus.

Link to Learning

The Çatalhöyük Research Project provides up-to-date information about excavations at the site, as well as detailed descriptions of its architecture and artifacts and the way its people may once have lived.

Far to the south of Çatalhöyük, in the Jordan River valley east of Jerusalem, was an even older Neolithic city, Jericho . Archaeologists estimate that Jericho was occupied as early as 8300 BCE. Its construction was very different from that of Çatalhöyük. Rather than being composed of homes with adjoining walls for protection, Jericho was protected by a large ditch and a thick stone wall that encircled the settlement. Within the settlement there was also a large stone tower, the purpose of which remains unclear. Nearby were similar Neolithic settlements at Ain Ghazal and Nahal Hemar . And far to the north on the Euphrates River was Abu Hureyra .

Archaeologists have determined that all these sites and others were part of a culture often described as Natufian ( Figure 2.23 ). The founding of most of them predates agriculture, and while their environments are very dry today, many thousands of years ago they were rich in wild edible plants and animals. It was likely the wealth of these resources that allowed the Natufian groups to settle there, only later adopting agriculture and building Neolithic settlements.

The earliest evidence of agriculture in South Asia has been found at the Neolithic settlement of Mehrgarh , situated in modern Pakistan to the north and west of the Indus River. As early as 7000 BCE, the people of this community were farming barley and raising goats and sheep. A few thousand years later they began domesticating cotton. Barley cultivation techniques may have been brought to the area from the Near East, though they also may have been developed independently. The structures of the settlement itself were made of dried mud bricks, with homes designed in a rectangular shape and divided into four parts. The people of Mehrgarh included skilled artisans capable of using sea shells, sandstone, and the rich blue lapis lazuli. Many of these materials came from great distances away, indicating that the settlement engaged in some type of long-distance trade, as did other Neolithic settlements.

The earliest Neolithic settlements in China, from around 8000 BCE, were located along two of its major rivers, the Yellow and the Yangtze. Along the Yellow River, people mainly cultivated millet, while on the Yangtze it was rice. These were areas with an abundance of water, access to fertile grasslands, and a variety of edible plants and animals for gathering and hunting, and Neolithic settlements proliferated. The people domesticated pigs and dogs and supplemented their diets of rice and millet by hunting, fishing, and gathering wild plants. They also made cord from hemp and pottery from clay.

Two of the early sites discovered there are Pengtoushan and Bashidang , both located in the Yangtze River valley in modern Hunan province. They may have been settled as early as 7500 BCE and preserve evidence of some of the earliest cultivation of wild rice. Homes were made by either digging partially into the ground or building on earth platforms with a central post to hold up the roof. A large ditch surrounds Bashidang, which may have served to channel water from the settlement and into the river. This surrounding-ditch design has been found at other locations and gradually developed into a type of moat around the settlements.

In other areas around the world, the shift to agriculture happened in similar fashion. Sites with permanent settlement, the practice of agriculture, the use of pottery, and other characteristics associated with particular Neolithic cultures have been discovered in a great number of places. The earliest known agricultural settlements in the Americas have been found in northeastern Mexico, where as early as 6500 BCE people were cultivating plants like pepper and squash. In the Andes Mountains region of South America, Neolithic settlements growing potatoes and manioc began to emerge as early as 3000 BCE. The cultivation of taro in New Guinea may have begun as early as 7000 BCE. Along the Danube River valley in Europe, Neolithic settlements began to emerge around 6000 BCE, likely having adopted cereal farming from the Near East. And in central Africa, farming of white Guinea yams began around 5000 BCE, later including crops like millet and sorghum.

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From Hunters to Settlers: How the Neolithic Revolution Changed the World

• Read Later  

The archaeological understanding of the Neolithic Revolution (or First Agricultural Revolution) has changed significantly since research on the subject first began in the early 20th century. This change from hunter-gatherer groups to agrarian communities seems to have occurred around 12,000 years ago, and with it came huge population growth. But it is still not clear exactly what initiated this change, or whether agriculture led to larger communities or the reverse.

Neolithic Settlers

It is now known that humans were already living in permanent settlements as hunter-gatherers before the emergence of true plant and animal domestication. However, the reason for the shift to agriculture is not entirely understood. An increasingly popular suggestion is that pressure to adopt agriculture came from the prior existence of relatively large permanent settlements, which contradicts the traditional view that agriculture led to large permanent settlements in the ancient Near East.

It is now known that humans were already living in permanent settlements as hunter-gatherers before the emergence of true plant and animal domestication. ( earthchangesmedia.com )

Did Climate Change Prompt the First Agricultural Revolution?

One of the earliest explanations for why agriculture developed when it did was climate change. An early hypothesis, proposed by V. Gordon Child, was that desiccation of the Levant created a scarcity of food requiring humans to learn to grow their own food to survive.

• New Study Indicates that Europe Owes Ancestry and Agriculture to Early Anatolian Farmers
• Rising Inequality Began with Agriculture and Domestication of Plants and Animals

One problem with climate change being the main cause is that the development of agriculture was already underway before the climate began to change significantly at the end of the Pleistocene around 11,000 BP. Just before the rise of true plant and animal domestication, humans in the Levant were practicing a form of “proto-agriculture” as early as 11,500 BP. These proto-agriculturalists were harvesting wild grain and managing wild animals prior to their domestication, which is required for true agriculture and animal husbandry. It is at least unclear that domestication of plants and animals was mainly in response to climate change rather than some other factor.

A Neolithic grinding stone for grain. ( José-Manuel Benito Álvarez/ CC BY SA 2.5 )

Agriculture was already in development before the climate changed in the Levant. It is possible that the primary factors in the rise of agriculture may have been social instead of environmental. Recent archaeological evidence reveals the existence of settled villages as early as 23,000 BP. These early settlements were not true farming communities, but small villages of hunter-gatherers consisting of just a handful of huts. They were nonetheless at least semi-permanent and larger than settlements that had come before them.

Chicken or Egg?

Recent archaeological research shows the slow development of semi-permanent to permanent settled communities over the past 15,000 to 20,000 years. This suggests that rather than agriculture leading to large permanent settlements, it may have been the other way around. The emergence of increasingly larger settled communities may have led to the necessity of agriculture.

Climate probably did still play a role. For example, the shift from the Pleistocene to the Holocene did result in climatic changes, which may have made the environment less abundant, forcing Levantine communities to adopt full scale farming and animal husbandry because foraging and proto-agriculture could no longer sustain their settled way of life. The reason for the rise of agriculture, however, may have been to preserve large settled communities that were already existing - as opposed to allowing for the emergence of large settled communities that had not previously existed.

Early farmers. ( Out of the Woods )

A Cultural Cause

This brings up another question: if an agricultural revolution was not what initially led to densely populated settlements and social complexity, then what did? Why didn’t agriculture arise earlier in the 100,000 years since the emergence of behaviorally modern humans? One possibility that has been suggested by some archaeologists is that something happened in human cultural evolution that made larger permanent communities easier to form and this prompted the Neolithic revolution.

Population Increase and Social Complexity

Increase in population necessarily results in an increase in social complexity. For example, in slightly more modern times, once there is a large population of people living together who are not related, it is necessary for courthouses, police forces, and other third parties to ease conflict resolution since it is less likely that there will be someone related to one or both parties who can mediate the conflict.

• Beekeeping may go back to the early years of agriculture, up to 9,000 years ago
• Ancient Skeletons Change History: Farming Invented Multiple Times Across the Globe

As a result, greater social complexity, such as third-party institutions, is required for groups beyond a certain size to be sustainable. It is possible that large densely populated settlements didn’t exist before about 15,000 years ago because humans had not yet developed third party institutions not based on kinship to mediate conflicts between unrelated individuals that could cause the group to disintegrate.

‘The dawn of civilization - Egypt and Chaldaea’ (1897). ( Public Domain ) Third party institutions are necessary to make the various aspects of a civilization work and to mediate conflicts.

Around 70,000-100,000 BP, the earliest art emerged in Africa and then spread to Eurasia and eventually to Australia and the Americas. It is not clear what caused this, but one hypothesis is that a rewiring of the human brain occurred without changing the physical appearance of Homo sapiens - that made Homo sapiens capable of producing art and advanced tools which do not appear earlier in the archaeological record.

It is possible that something comparable happened 15,000-20,000 years ago that allowed humans to gather into larger social groups and, therefore, allowed for large, permanent settlements. It may have been the invention of third-party social institutions not based on the family which were able to mediate conflicts within large groups of unrelated individuals. It could also have been some sort of advance in cognition enabled by cultural adaptation. Whatever it was, it appears that the increase in settlement size and social complexity were already well underway when true agriculture and animal husbandry appeared in human prehistory.

Egyptians with domesticated cattle and corn circa 1422-1411 BC. ( Public Domain )

Top Image: Ancient farmers. Source: Heritage of Japan

By  Caleb Strom

Watkins, Trevor. "New light on Neolithic revolution in south-west Asia." Antiquity 84.325 (2010):

North, Douglass C., and Robert Paul Thomas. "The first economic revolution." The Economic

History Review 30.2 (1977): 229-241.

Sherratt, Andrew. "V. Gordon Childe: archaeology and intellectual history." Past & Present 125

(1989): 151-185.

Zeder, Melinda A. "The origins of agriculture in the Near East." Current Anthropology 52.S4

(2011): S221-S235.

Opps, misposted, I thought I was posting to the article about yorkshire neolithic farmers!

There is an easy way to determine the way of life of Yorkshire Farmers, speak to them, they haven't changed very much in millennia. Go on their land, they have a tendency to shoot first and ask questions later (stones, arrows or shot, whatever is available). People consider the potters wheel leading to a wheeled vehicle, but I wonder if a mill for grain came first.

Caleb Strom is currently a graduate student studying planetary science. He considers himself a writer, scientist, and all-around story teller. His interests include planetary geology, astrobiology, paleontology, archaeology, history, space archaeology, and SETI.

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Dynamics of the Neolithic Revolution

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The Neolithic Revolution began between 10,000 and 12,000 years ago at several widely dispersed locations across the world, when our ancestors first began planting and raising crops. Agricultural communities sprang up almost simultaneously in Mesopotamia , China , Southeast Asia, Africa , Mesoamerica, and South America replacing the hunter-gatherer mode of subsistence that had been utilized for hundreds of thousands of years by Homo .

Evolution of Farming

The shift from the hunter-gatherer strategy to farming probably occurred in stages. For millions of years, our ancestors subsisted on the bounty provided by our natural environment. Our earliest upright ancestors may not have had a particularly orderly approach to finding food, but by the time of Homo erectus , hominids were surely collectors, who planned the use of resources the location of which was known and monitored. By the time anatomically modern humans appeared, Homo sapiens must have had considerable knowledge about how plants and animals developed and were returning to the same areas year after year to harvest and hunt dependable sources.

Once they were regularly returning to the same spot, it may not have taken them long to become cultivators, who enhanced the productivity of native fields by weeding, pruning, and burning. They probably began tilling with a digging stick or hoe to reduce competition and encourage germination. They may also have discovered at an early stage that crops did better the following year if the soil was turned after harvest. Eventually, they became producers who transplanted small numbers of plants and held a few animals captive. These early gardens were probably very small and in close proximity to residences and remained small until humans decided to make a major commitment to agriculture . The original idea for planting may have come from waste dumps, where seeds were observed to germinate and grow. Larger farms may have first appeared when a specific farmer class emerged. During the early stages of the domestication process, Homo sapiens may not have been consciously selecting superior plant types, but it would not have taken our ancestors long to become domesticators who saved seeds and clonal material of superior types for replanting.

Diversity of Crop Domestication

The first crops were as diverse as the people and places where agriculture began. The climates of the earth where plants were first domesticated varied widely, and as a result, a wide array of plant and animal species were domesticated in each of them. In the Middle East, there were huge natural stands of wheat and barley, leading the early farmers in this region to exploit these as their staple crops. In Southeast Asia, wheat and barley were absent, but large-grained rice was plentiful, and as a result, rice became one of the crops of choice. Wheat, barley, and rice were not present in Mesoamerica and Africa, so people exploited the locally abundant monocotyledons: sorghum in Africa and maize in Mesoamerica. No large-grained species of any kind existed in South America, and as a result, the early farmers there domesticated the tuberous species potato, sweet potato, and cassava, and the pseudo-grains chenopod and amaranth.

Starchy staples were among the first domesticants at all the centers of crop origins, but they were always complemented with a high-protein vegetable and fiber crop. Vegetables in the legume family were domesticated in all the major regions, including cowpea (Africa), soybean (China), groundnut (South America), lentil and chickpea ( Near East ). Amaranth and chenopod were also very important sources of vegetable protein in the Americas. Fiber was provided by different cotton species in Africa and South America, flax in the Near East, and hemp in China.

To the core group of crops in each region, additional leafy vegetables, spices, oil crops, and fruits were gradually added. Among the last group of plants to be domesticated were the fruits. While the grape and fig are very ancient and may have been cultivated for 10,000 years, most of our other woody fruit crops were among the last additions to farming. This may be due, in part, to tree fruits taking so long to mature, since after planting the farmer must wait 5-10 years for a harvest. In addition, the fruit crops are outcrossed species; seedlings would frequently be inferior to the mother plant due to cross-pollination, and so complex pruning and grafting techniques had to be developed to fully exploit their potential.

Early Stages of Plant Domestication

At most of the early agricultural sites, the transition from prehistoric hunter-gatherer societies to farming communities was a gradual one that took thousands of years. A very early record of this slow transition is found in the excavations of Richard MacNeisch in the Tehuacán Valley of Mexico. He excavated 12 sites and uncovered 12,000 years of agricultural history in the area. Initially, the people lived on wild plant food and small animals, such as jack rabbits, deer, peccary, and lizards. They collected plant foods on a scheduled round of annual activities. About 9000 years ago, game became scarcer, and the people began to shift more of their energy into the collection of wild plants, including squash, chili pepper , and avocado. They scattered in small foraging groups during the dry season and came together during seasons of plenty. They may have begun the sporadic cultivation of wild plants during this period, but the effort was minimal.

Over the next 5000 years, the people of the Tehuacán Valley gradually increased their use of domesticated plants, and by 7000 BP (before present), about 10% of their diet came from cultivated plants. They were outside the original areas of domestication, but by this time, they were growing a large group of presumably introduced crops including maize, amaranth, beans, squashes, and chilies. The maize ears were only about the size of a pencil eraser, but the plant now existed in its modern form. The dog appeared about 5000 years ago. As time went on, people continued to devote more and more effort to farming, and by 3000 BP, the majority of their food came from domesticated sources, with maize being grown, along with avocado, amaranth, squash, and cotton. Turkeys were domesticated about 2000 years ago.

Similar evidence of transitions from hunters to farmers can be found at numerous locations across the Near East. One such site is Jericho in the Jordan Valley, where a continuous record of 9000 years of habitation was left as people built new mud huts on top of others as they deteriorated over time. In the earliest period, the settlement consisted of Natufians, who were primarily hunters of gazelles and foxes and who tended a few types of cereals but had no domestic animals. About 9000 years ago, they began to raise cereals in earnest, and there is the first evidence that sheep and goats were being domesticated. A similar long-term record of successive settlement is recorded at Ҫatalhöyük , Turkey , where people were initially foragers who raised some cereals on the side, but by 10,000 BP had domesticated cattle and were large-scale farmers.

At early stages in the domestication process, a number of changes began to appear in the genetic and physiological make-up of many crop species. Some of these changes were due to conscious selection such as increases in palatability and color, but many were the unconscious byproduct of planting and harvesting. Harvesting resulted in the selection of non-shattering seed cases, more determinate growth, more uniform ripening, and increased seed production. All these characteristics would have increased the likelihood that the seed of a plant type would be collected and subsequently planted. Seedling competition caused by planting in proximity probably increased seedling vigor and rate of germination, as individuals with these characteristics would have been most likely to win the race to reproductive age. Greater seed size probably contributed to seedling vigor, and a loss of germination inhibitors would have allowed faster germination. Thin seed coats also evolved under domestication, as a reduced seed coat is more permeable to water and results in more rapid germination.

Causes of the Neolithic Revolution

A question that has intrigued anthropologists and ethnobotanists alike is why it took so long for farming to emerge. It seems likely that people had the wherewithal to farm long before they actually began doing it. Our ancestors surely gained considerable knowledge about plants and animals through the very acts of hunting and gathering. They had observed seasonal patterns of plant development and animal migrations and noticed seeds germinating and growing on their dump heaps. They burned fields to drive game and must have noticed the subsequent plant regenerations. They had also developed an intimate knowledge of how countless plant species could be used for food and medicine and knew how to detoxify otherwise poisonous food sources.

Probably the oldest formal idea about why humans began cultivation is Gordon Childe's Oasis Theory. He suggested that, after glaciation, North Africa and Southwest Asia became drier and humans began to aggregate in areas where there was water. People first learned how to domesticate the animals that congregated around them, and then, as human populations grew, they learned how to raise crops to avoid starvation. While this theory is an appealing explanation for agriculture at xeric sites, it is now known that mesic areas in Southeast Asia and tropical South America also spawned agriculture.

Sauer, in his classic book Agricultural Origins and Dispersals (1952), suggested that farming first arose among fishermen in Southeast Asia. They had a dependable food source, were sedentary, and therefore had the time and strength to experiment with new food production systems. Again, this theory works well in areas where fish and crustaceans were readily available, but it does not explain the origin of agriculture in dry places without seafood, such as Mesoamerica and Central Africa.

There are also suggestions that agriculture arose as a byproduct of religious ceremony. Plants providing ritualistic drugs were gathered and perhaps grown. Seeds may have been scattered on burial mounds. Animals could have been domesticated for sacrifice. While religion would have been a strong impetus for Neolithic peoples to apply what they knew about the life cycles of plants and animals, we are still left with our original question of why it took so long for people to begin the farming process. There is considerable evidence that people were spiritual long before they began domesticating plants and animals.

Other theories developed on why humans began farming revolve around either climatic change restricting resource availability and stimulating agricultural activity or population growth reaching a tipping point where there were no longer sufficient resources to feed the growing masses. As populations grew, food requirements may have risen to the point where alternative sources were needed to supply sufficient sustenance. It may simply be that our ancestors began raising crops when they could no longer collect enough food from the wild to feed themselves and their families.

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There is strong evidence that populations were indeed expanding during the Agricultural Revolution at most early sites of crop origins, but it is not known whether the invention of agriculture stimulated that growth or was developed because of that growth. The simple answer as to why it took us so long to begin farming is probably that hunting and gathering was a very comfortable way of life, and humans had to have a very good reason to give it up. Juliet Clutton-Brock states that "With the abundance of food and excellent raw materials of wood, bone, flint, and antler it is difficult to see what the Mesolithic people of Europe lacked" (14).

Stone Age people were complex, intelligent creatures who could readily adapt to the situations at hand. They liked hunting and gathering and were pushed towards farming only by a variety of regionally specific forces, including population growth, climatic change, overhunting, religion, or a simple desire for more of something in short supply, be it food, spice, oil, ceremonial color or fiber. Food production is only one of the possible reasons for bringing plants under cultivation.

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Neolithic Period

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Hancock, J. (2022, February 07). Dynamics of the Neolithic Revolution . World History Encyclopedia . Retrieved from https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1937/dynamics-of-the-neolithic-revolution/

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Hancock, James. " Dynamics of the Neolithic Revolution ." World History Encyclopedia . Last modified February 07, 2022. https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1937/dynamics-of-the-neolithic-revolution/.

Hancock, James. " Dynamics of the Neolithic Revolution ." World History Encyclopedia . World History Encyclopedia, 07 Feb 2022. Web. 17 Aug 2024.

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Essay on Neolithic Revolution

Students are often asked to write an essay on Neolithic Revolution in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

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100 Words Essay on Neolithic Revolution

What was the neolithic revolution.

Long ago, people lived by hunting animals and gathering wild plants. About 12,000 years ago, something big changed for humans: the Neolithic Revolution. This was when we started farming. Instead of moving around, people began to stay in one place, grow their crops, and raise animals like cows and sheep.

Changes in Living

Because of farming, people built homes and lived together in larger groups called communities. They had more food, so more people could live in one area. This meant they could make bigger villages and start to trade things with each other.

Tools and Technology

With the Neolithic Revolution, new tools were made. People used stone to create sharp edges for cutting plants. They also made better tools for digging and farming. This helped them grow more food and feed more people.

Impact on Society

Farming changed how people worked together. They had to plan and share tasks like planting and harvesting. This led to the creation of different jobs and the start of a system where some people had more things than others.

250 Words Essay on Neolithic Revolution

Long ago, before the Neolithic Revolution, people had no homes and wandered here and there looking for food. They hunted animals and gathered wild plants to eat. Then, about 12,000 years ago, something big changed for humans. This change is called the Neolithic Revolution. It was when people learned to grow their own food and live in one place.

Farming Begins

Instead of chasing animals for meat or searching for wild berries, people started to grow crops like wheat and barley. They also began to keep animals like goats and sheep. This was the start of farming. With farming, they could make more food than they needed right away. So, they could stay in one spot and build homes.

Villages and New Skills

When people didn’t have to move around so much, they built villages. They made houses from mud bricks and wood. They also learned new skills like making pots from clay to store their food. Some people got very good at certain jobs, like making tools from stone.

Big Changes

The Neolithic Revolution changed everything. People didn’t have to wander for food, so they could have bigger families. With more people, they could do even more things, like make better tools and clothes. They also started to trade with other groups, which meant they could get things they didn’t have.

This big change made life easier in many ways, and it set the stage for the next big steps in human history, like building cities and creating writing. The Neolithic Revolution is why we live in towns and cities today, instead of moving around like the hunters and gatherers before us.

500 Words Essay on Neolithic Revolution

Before the Neolithic Revolution, people were hunters and gatherers. They moved from place to place to find animals to hunt and plants to eat. Life was hard because food was not always easy to find. Then, people learned to grow plants and raise animals. This was the start of farming.

Farming Changes Everything

When people began farming, they could grow lots of food in one place. This meant they didn’t need to move around anymore. They could build homes and live in the same place all year. This was much easier than being hunters and gatherers.

Villages and New Jobs

As people settled down, they started to live together in groups called villages. In these villages, not everyone had to be a farmer. Some people could do other jobs. For example, some made pots to store food, others made clothes, and some became leaders to make decisions for the village.

With different jobs, people started to trade. A person who made pots might trade with a farmer for food. This trading helped people get things they couldn’t make or grow themselves.

People also learned to make things like pottery for cooking and storing food, and weaving to make clothes. These new skills were very important for village life.

The Impact on Society

The Neolithic Revolution changed society in big ways. Because people lived in villages, they started to have more children. With more people, villages grew into towns and later into cities.

As cities grew, so did the need for rules and laws. Leaders and governments became important to make sure people got along and worked together. This was the beginning of the kind of society we know today.

The Neolithic Revolution was a major turning point in history. It changed how people lived from moving around to staying in one place and farming. This led to the start of villages, new jobs, and the growth of society. Because of farming, people could live together, work together, and build the world we know now. This revolution was the first step towards modern life.

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Positive and Negative Outcomes of The Neolithic Revolution

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