THE NEOLITHIC ORIGINS OF CIVILIZATION

Defining “Civilization”

The term civilization often elicits mostly idealized images of ancient empires, monumental architecture, and the luxurious lives of ruling classes. Civilization, however, is a tricky term. In the United States, students of history studied Western Civilization, almost exclusively, through the 1950s. In their studies, civilizations were advanced societies with urban centers, rooted in European or Middle Eastern cultures. America’s origins were explained as based in these western civilizations. However, more recent scholars have definitely broadened the geographical focus by recognizing that worldwide from 3,500 to 1,000 BCE at least seven independent civilizations emerged in different regions.

Scholars continue to debate the definition of civilization, and the current consensus amongst World Historians is to recognize characteristics that civilizations share. Common characteristics of civilizations include food surpluses, higher population densities, social stratification, systems of taxation, labor specialization, regular trade, and accumulated learning (knowledge passed down from generation to generation). The list here is not all-inclusive by any means, but it indicates the complexity of the societies that scholars have labeled civilizations.

In addition to heated debates about its exact definition, civilization is a loaded term, meaning that it can contain a value judgment. If we use the term carelessly, it seems to indicate that some societies are deemed civilized and worthy of inclusion, while others are uncivilized and thus not worth our study. In part, our sensitivity to this issue is a response to the tendency of past historians, including many of those working in Europe in the 1800s, to assume that there was a natural progression from an uncivilized state to civilization. These historians viewed people who had values, ways of living, and religious beliefs different from theirs as uncivilized. They further believed that these allegedly uncivilized peoples were behind or needed to catch up with those who were civilized. Today, World Historians try to appreciate the great diversity of human experiences and consciously remove these sorts of value judgments. Historians avoid assumptions that some societies in the past were better or further along than others. Therefore, many remain wary of the uncritical use of the term civilization.

For our purposes, let us leave aside any value judgments. Societies labeled as civilizations were not inherently better than any others. In fact, as we will see, civilizations demonstrated various vulnerabilities. Considering the prominence of elements such as war, slavery, and the spread of diseases in so many civilizations, there were sometimes advantages to living outside this definition. For example, in comparing societies, scholars have found that in many instances people residing in decentralized states were healthier and lived longer than did their counterparts in early civilizations. However, people living in societies with social stratification, labor specialization, and trade usually left more written records and archeological evidence, which historians can analyze to narrate our past. The available resources mean that civilizations tend to be better represented in the written historical records. As you read about past civilizations, keep in mind that historians are currently enhancing our understanding of societies that remained mobile, rejected hierarchies, or preserved their histories orally. These societies were also part of our shared past, even if they are harder to study or have received less scholarly attention.

The Neolithic Era

 

The term Neolithic or New Stone Age is most frequently used in connection with agriculture, which is the time when cereal cultivation and animal domestication was introduced. Because agriculture developed at different times in different regions of the world, there is no single date for the beginning of the Neolithic. In the Near East, agriculture was developed around 9,000 BCE, in Southeast Europe around 7,000 BCE, and later in other regions. Even within a specific region, agriculture developed during different times. For example, agriculture first developed in Southeast Europe about 7,000 BCE, in Central Europe about 5,500 BCE, and Northern Europe about 4,000 BCE. In East Asia, the Neolithic goes from 6000 to 2000 BCE.

Pottery is another element that makes the dating of the Neolithic problematic. In some regions, the appearance of pottery is considered a symbol of the Neolithic, but this notion makes the term Neolithic even more ambiguous, since the use of pottery does not always occur after agriculture: in Japan, pottery appears before agriculture, while in the Near East agriculture pre-dates pottery production.

 

Between about 12,000-10,000 BCE, after thousands of years of a Paleolithic lifestyle, humans developed the abilities to cultivate crops rather than depend on gathering what nature happened to provide. Communities also domesticated animals for food and labor, rather than relying solely on hunting. Given the centuries during which this change occurred, it is hard to call it a revolution nevertheless, most historians now call the move from hunter-gatherer lifestyles to farming the “Agricultural Revolution.” This shift was the most significant historical change ever experienced in human history. It made civilization possible, and in turn led to every other aspect of the lifestyles we now exhibit.

What caused humans to change from a hunter-gather social organization to create the structures and patterns we call civilization? What made humans change from hunter-gatherers to farmers who gathered together in large, complex societies characterized by city life, hierarchical political organization, specialization of crafts and occupations, formal laws, written languages, and standardized cultural and religious behavior? Although all continents were inhabited by humans by 20,000 BCE, no community began to actively engage in agriculture until 8500 BCE, and the first civilization did not arise until around 3,500 BCE. What took us so long?

The first, and simplest, answer to this question is that until 8500 BCE farming did not appear to be appreciably better than hunting and gathering as a lifestyle. As Jared Diamond has pointed out in his book Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, despite the amount of effort and time hunter-gatherers put into their search for food on a daily basis, early farmers probably had to work far harder, with no more guarantee they would not starve given the vagaries of weather. With this kind of risk-reward ratio, it is no surprise the switch to farming took so long. If farming was no guarantee of survival, the idea of combining large numbers of people in one place would be, for a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, a sure recipe for starvation.

There are several competing (but not mutually exclusive) theories about the factors that drove populations to take up agriculture. The most prominent of these are:

• The Oasis Theory, originally proposed by Raphael Pumpelly in 1908, and popularized by V. Gordon Childe in 1928, suggests as the climate got drier due to the Atlantic depressions shifting northward, communities contracted to oases where they were forced into close association with animals. These animals were then domesticated together with planting of seeds. However, this theory has little support amongst archaeologists today because subsequent climate data suggests that the region was getting wetter rather than drier.
• The Hilly Flanks hypothesis, proposed by Robert Braidwood in 1948, suggests that agriculture began in the hilly flanks of the Taurus and Zagros mountains, where the climate was not drier, as Childe had believed, and that fertile land supported a variety of plants and animals amenable to domestication.
• The Feasting model by Brian Hayden suggests that agriculture was driven by ostentatious displays of power, such as giving feasts, to exert dominance. This system required assembling large quantities of food, a demand which drove agricultural technology.
• The Demographic theories proposed by Carl Sauer and adapted by Lewis Binford and Kent Flannery posit that an increasingly sedentary population outgrew the resources in the local environment and required more food than could be gathered. Various social and economic factors helped drive the need for food.
• The Evolutionary/Intentionality theory, developed by David Rindos and others, views agriculture as an evolutionary adaptation of plants and humans. Starting with domestication by protection of wild plants, it led to specialization of location and then full-fledged domestication.

Neolithic populations generally had poorer nutrition, shorter life expectancies, and a more labor-intensive lifestyle than hunter-gatherers. Diseases jumped from animals to humans, and agriculturalists suffered from more anemia, vitamin deficiencies, spinal deformations, and dental pathologies. The productivity “payoff” of switching from foraging to farming was not obvious in the early days of farming. Thus, it is unlikely that the invention of farming was driven solely by people seeing immediate boosts to the food supply.

When they did attempt to control their food sources, domesticating plants was not an overnight nor an abrupt shift and in some cases, was not done consciously. Seeds disperse by attaching themselves to clothing, feathers, and fur, or drift in the wind, or are attractive to eat due to the colorful, tasty fruit that surrounds them. Animals and humans eat them and either spit seeds out, or seeds pass through the digestive system and germinate. Thus many plants humans ate likely followed them around along the tribe’s migration route. Almonds are an excellent example. Wild almonds are bitter and contain the chemical compound of cyanide. A handful of wild almonds can be lethal. However, in a very small percentage of almond trees,­ mutations produce almonds without this bitter chemical. Humans would have raided trees where sweet almonds grew, and perhaps dropped a few on the way back to camp causing more mutant trees. Such unconscious acts created a kind of natural selection by which mutant plants humans found most useful tended to have their seeds better distributed due to human consumption patterns, so humans were modifying plants from very early times.

The need to more actively control food supplies and pursue conscious cultivation was likely driven by climate changes. Around 10,000 BCE as the last ice age was receding, anthropologists and archeologists have found evidence the area known as the Fertile Crescent had a very different climate than it has today. At that time, as temperatures worldwide rose, rain in the area of the Zagros Mountains in Turkey and Iran was common, feeding two major river systems, the Tigris and the Euphrates. At the same time, cool, temperate conditions that prevailed in the areas that are today Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, and Jordan gave way to a climate that was more arid. Pollen samples show areas that had been covered with oak forests, good for hunting and gathering grounds, subsequently experienced less rainfall. Increasingly arid conditions meant forests, and the plants and animals that go with them, retreated to more temperate zones such as mountains, meaning hunter-gatherer tribes had to go farther and farther in search of food. They likely were driven to supplement their food supplies, leading to advances in cultivation.

Evidence shows that about 9,000 years BCE, during the Neolithic Age, hunter gatherer groups in this region had begun a kind of crude agriculture. They farmed via a slash and burn method. They would clear a piece of land, burn the stumps and weeds left, then sow seeds of wild wheat or barley amongst ashes rich in nutrients. Fields were usually left untended and the tribe would leave to forage over the growing season, coming back when the crop was near ready for harvest. Stone scythes found in the area and dated from 9,000 to 10,000 BCE still show the sheen of silica left by wild wheat and barley.

It is unclear how long it took but eventually selective cultivation led strains of wild grains to evolve into plants more suitable for human cultivation and consumption. For example, rather than producing small grains protected by armored stalks which were very hard to harvest, grains humans began planting by around 8,500 BCE were larger, easy to grind, unarmored, and stayed on the stalk until cut, making harvest far easier. One estimate indicates by 8,500 BCE, in the area that became the city of Jericho, crop domestication changed the productivity of land from 2% edible biomass to 90% edible biomass on a cultivated tract of land. This huge jump in productivity made it possible to support an increasingly dense population, laying the foundation for settled civilizations.

Revolution or Something Else?

In order to reflect the deep impact that agriculture had over the human population, an Australian archaeologist named Gordon Childe popularized the term “Neolithic Revolution” in the 1940s CE. However, today, it is believed that the impact of agricultural innovation has been exaggerated in the past: the development of Neolithic culture appears to have been a gradual rather than a sudden change. Moreover, before agriculture was established, archaeological evidence has shown that there is usually a period of semi-nomadic life, where pre-agricultural societies might have a network of campsites and live in different locations according to how the resources respond to seasonal variations. Sometimes, one of these campsites might be adopted as a basecamp; the group might spend the majority of time there during the year exploiting local resources, including wild plants: this is a step closer to agriculture. Agriculture and foraging are not totally incompatible ways of life. This means that a group could perform hunter-gatherer activities for part of the year and some farming during the rest, perhaps on a small scale. Rather than a revolution, the archaeological record suggests that the adoption of agriculture is the result of small and gradual changes, in what is sometimes called a climacteric — a series of uneven, uncoordinated changes over a period of time, sometimes even reversing direction.

Agriculture was developed independently in several regions. Since its origin, the dominant pattern in these separate regions is the spread of agricultural economies and the reduction of hunting and gathering activities, to the point that today hunting economies only persist in marginal areas where farming is not possible, such as frozen arctic regions, densely forested areas, or arid deserts.

Major changes were introduced by agriculture, affecting the way human society was organized and how it used the earth, including forest clearance, root crops, and cereal cultivation that can be stored for long periods of time, along with the development of new technologies for farming and herding such as plows, irrigation systems, etc. More intensive agriculture implies more food available for more people, more villages, and a movement towards a more complex social and political organization. As the population density of the villages increase, they gradually evolve into towns and finally into cities.

Changes During the Neolithic Era

By adopting a sedentary way of life, the Neolithic groups increased their awareness of territoriality. During the 9600–6900 BCE period in the Near East, there were also innovations in arrowheads, yet no important changes in the animals hunted was detected. However, human skeletons were found with arrowheads embedded in them and also some settlements such as Jericho were surrounded with a massive wall and ditch around this time. It seems that the evidence of this period is a testimony of inter-communal conflicts, not far from organized warfare. There were also additional innovations in stone tool production that became widespread and adopted by many groups in distant locations, which is evidence for the existence of important networks of exchange and cultural interaction.

Living in permanent settlements brought new ways of social organization. As the subsistence strategies of Neolithic communities became more efficient, the population of the different settlements increased. We know from anthropological works that the larger the group, the less egalitarian and more hierarchical a society becomes. Those in the community who were involved in the management and allocation of food resources increased their social importance. Archaeological evidence has shown that during the early Neolithic, houses did not have individual storage facilities: storage and those activities linked to food preparation for storage were managed at village level. At the site of Jarf el Ahmar, in north Syria, there is a large subterranean structure which was used as a communal storage facility. This construction is in a central location among the households and there is also evidence that several rituals were performed in it.

Another site in northern Syria named Tell Abu Hureyra, displays evidence for the transition from foraging to farming: it was a gradual process, which took several centuries. The first inhabitants of the site hunted gazelles, wild asses and wild cattle. Then, we see evidence of change: gazelle consumption dropped and the amount of sheep consumption rose (wild in the beginning and domesticated in the end). Sheep herding turned into the main source of meat and gazelle hunting became a minor activity. Human remains show an increase of tooth wear of all adults, which reflects the importance of ground cereal in the diet. It is interesting that once pottery was introduced, tooth wear rates decreased, but the frequency of bad teeth increased, which suggests that baked food made from stone-ground flour was largely replaced by dishes such as porridge and gruel, which were boiled in pots.

Family life also changed significantly during the Neolithic. Sedentary communities invested more time and resources into the construction of permanent homes housing nuclear families. People spent less time with the community as a whole and within homes it became easier to accumulate wealth and keep secrets.

 

Societal Changes

The traditional view is that the shift to agricultural food production supported a denser population, which in turn supported larger sedentary communities, the accumulation of goods and tools, and specialization in diverse forms of new labor. Overall, a population could increase its size more rapidly when resources were more available. The resulting larger societies led to the development of different means of decision making and governmental organization. Food surpluses made possible the development of a social elite freed from labor, who dominated their communities and monopolized decision-making. There were deep social divisions and inequality between the sexes, with women’s status declining as men took on greater roles as leaders and warriors. Social class was determined by occupation, with farmers and craftsmen at the lower end, and priests and warriors at the higher.

By 8,500 BCE, cultivated agriculture was used by some groups as the primary means of providing food. But other groups who likely saw agriculture in practice refused to adopt it for hundreds or even thousands of years. Others adopted agriculture, abandoned it, and finally adopted it again hundreds of years later. The shift from hunter-gatherer to agriculturally based communities was not rapid nor universal nor consistently pursued in early centuries of this revolution. This was a slow, piecemeal, but in the end epic, revolution.

History is not a story of uninterrupted progress or a journey to a certain goal. History is the story of a constant chain of problems humans confronted and solutions they attempted. There were many problems humans faced as a result of abandoning their system of foraging and informal tribal social organization as they embarked on the road to settled agriculture and complex social systems. Human populations began to grow rapidly once people created and stored food surpluses. Even during the transitional Neolithic period, as humans made partial steps to control their food supply, human populations soared. Once humans began to completely rely on cultivated food, global populations entered a period of escalation still evident today. The ability to cultivate agriculture enabled humans to breach natural population limits, establishing the foundation for the myriad achievements of human societies – but at a price. Human population growth led to ancient as well as contemporary problems, including intense pressures on natural resources, threats to the ecosystems, and social and political tensions, consequences seen in the past and acutely in the present. In the 21st century, we confront many dilemmas related to the still dramatic growth in human population set in motion at the start of human history.

 

Learning in Action – ‘World Population – An Interactive Experience’

View the website: “Exploring Population Growth From 1 C.E. to 2050”, World Population History.Org.

Link: https://worldpopulationhistory.org/map/1/mercator/1/0/25/

1. Go to menu and link to ‘Watch the Video’

2. On the same site, link to ‘Explore the Map and Timeline’. View the interactive animated maps; you can adjust for Themes and Overlays to retrieve different information.

The benefits of agriculture, as well as the problems it causes, are many. The vast increase in the percentage of biomass per acre consumable by humans meant farming groups could feed 10 to 100 times the number of people they could feed from the same region as hunter-gatherers. Since farming can be practiced near home by both sexes, the more hands on the farm the better. In farming cultures, the number of children increased as the spacing between having children decreased and food supplies became more reliable. Agriculture was both caused by, and was the cause of, increased population densities. Once farming secured much larger yields than food supplied by nature in the wild, the availability of food and need for working hands encouraged groups to increase their size. The labor intensive nature of farming encouraged people to settle in one place to watch over their farms and guard the produce harvested as well as corralled domestic animals.

An agricultural surplus provided for specialization of roles and tasks, and therefore a more complex society. Now only some members of the society were responsible for producing food surpluses that fed the entire community, leaving other societal members free to focus on additional tasks and roles. Some produced tools, some produced clothing or tools. Others became traders. Not all specialized jobs or roles were valued equally and the most powerful jobs were the political, military and religious leaders. No longer were all members of a social group relatively equal to one another, creating the roots of social hierarchy and a variety of structured class systems across agriculturally based civilizations.

The sedentary nature of new villages and farms, and need for careful planning, irrigation, and building projects, necessitated organization and long term planning, leading to the creation of formal governmental systems. Surpluses also meant more trade, and the emergence of taxation systems, which then meant the need for record keeping. This need to record economic interactions prompted creation of numerical and currency systems, as well as led to the invention of writing. These significant and substantive changes in social and political organization introduced problems as well as benefits over the next 8,000 years of human history.

Agriculture demands constant labor and attention, good soil, good weather, and plentiful water. Humans can fully control only one of the above factors: the amount of effort they invest. Efforts to ensure adequate water, arable (farm-able) soil and productive agriculture necessitated advances in technology and social organization. For example, the area around Jericho was relatively well watered by rainfall, but as a result of climate change became warmer and drier over time. Irrigation canals had to be dug and farms tended carefully to maximize production while conserving water. To maximize use of arable land, communities of farmers like those in Çatal Hüyük lived together in villages so they could maximize agricultural use of surrounding good land. To feed growing urban populations, organized activities were necessary to maximize labor efficiency. Houses had to be built, seeds stored and distributed, and everyone receive a share of the produce. Structured organization also required oversight to create and manage public work projects such as irrigation and defense fortifications. All these efforts required coordination of labor and resources, thus the need for structured, formal leadership. Emerging governmental authorities derived and justified control based on addressing needs of the community such as defending against threats of violence. Governments also justified their authority to plan, create laws, and distribute wealth on the basis of religious links, duties or support. In some cases governmental and religious authorities cooperated, or vied for power.

Hunter-gatherer groups, small in population and bound by kinship, had functioned with a very simple code of ethics. Everything was based on the value of all members of a family group who worked at essentially the same tasks – gathering food and survival. Social relations were moderated by known and accepted tribal traditions and customs. But in emerging agricultural societies, occupational specialization meant a differentiated value of individuals, leading to class differences and conflicts. Eventually the social structure of egalitarianism gave way to hierarchical and formally structured communities, and the formal law codes to regulate them. Dense settlements were no longer made up of those with kinship relations or shared customs. And there were now many issues causing conflicts, such as competition over land, class status, wealth, and power. Problems resulting from an increased number of strangers living together led to the need for laws, and formal governments to oversee and enforce those laws. Formalization of systems of morality and law became critical to prevent people from harming others with whom they had no social connection.

Having more goods and identified wealth than was necessary to survive accelerated divisions of class along wealth and power lines. The more surplus controlled, the more one could command and pay for labor. Since control of the land was the basis for agriculture, land ownership became the primary form of wealth, the center of ancient economies and power. Rather than the dominance of trade-based economics seen in modern societies, ancient economies and the power structures that accompanied them, were based on who controlled agriculture and land tenure systems.

Surpluses also enabled increases in trade, and greater trade also meant humans had the need to record economic interchange. Evidence indicates the earliest uses of symbols were for keeping economic records; these symbols evolved into the first written language systems. Later this powerful tool of writing was used to record events and knowledge related to religion, politics, as well as cultural preservation and transmission. The development of writing had profound consequences for all developing human cultures.

Formal, structured religious systems, religious rituals, and specialized religious leaders emerged in the earliest civilizations, replacing informal tribal spiritual practices. A structured and shared religion became a means of maintaining stability in new, sprawling urban centers. In many cases religion reinforced obedience and subservience to growing states . In virtually all early civilizations, religious leaders, specialists who linked the people to their gods or god, secured significant power and influence, dictating and enforcing religious practices, taxes, and obligations.

Another significant problem humans faced as a result of the advent of civilization was intensified warfare. Certainly violence between tribes occurred throughout the Paleolithic era. But the incidence and costs of violent conflict between societies significantly increased with development of agricultural villages and later the larger civilizations. Not only did settled civilizations have far more things to fight about (land, wealth, natural resources, power, class, religion), but larger populations meant leaders were more willing to risk community members in wars.

Since societies were now settled, committed to living by their fields, herds and water supplies, communities could not simply move away from conflicts with hostile neighbors as nomadic tribes had done. Civilized city-states and empires throughout recorded history competed with each other militarily for resources, in particular land and water, and control of trade revenues. War and empire building started with the first civilization, Mesopotamia, and has continued to the present century. In all cases the means and motives of warfare were reflected the acquisition of, and desire for greater, wealth and agricultural surpluses.

 

Environmental Effects of the Agricultural Revolution

In addition to the creation of stratified societies and consolidation of control by political authorities, settled and growing populations reliant on cultivated agriculture produced significantly negative consequences for the environment. Agricultural cultivation, though usually productive, focused on use of only a small proportion of the edible wild plants available on the planet. Agricultural populations became reliant on cultivating just a few staple crops such as wheat, barley or rice. An agriculturally-based society thus relied (and still relies) on fewer food choices than hunter-gatherer societies had done, making a settled society vulnerable to disasters caused by crop failures. Most agricultural societies, even today, rely on what is known as “mono-cropping” which means the vast majority of food produced is from one variety or one type of plant. If disease or weather adversely affects that strain of the plant, a society can be in danger of massive starvation; this has happened periodically in agriculturally based societies throughout history. Heavier pressure on the soil to feed larger, dense, settled populations also led to several problems with the soil. Contending with damage done to soil due to agricultural pressure has been a prominent factor in human history. Additionally, clearing trees and native grasses to plant, or to graze domestic animals, created less diverse and less robust ecological systems.

Farming, especially mono-cropping, puts a heavy burden on the land, frequently causing soil degradation due to depletion of nutrients in the soil, intensified soil salinization through irrigation practices, accelerated erosion of topsoil due to row-cropping, and increased infestations of insects feeding on specific crops. All these effects can, in the short or long term, result in disaster. Some historians conclude early agricultural societies were in fact more vulnerable to starvation than hunter-gatherers. This is likely why many groups resisted the shift to farming. By 3100 BCE, thousands of years after the Agricultural Revolution had begun, only 3% of all humans were farmers. The rest were still hunter-gatherers.

The Agricultural Revolution meant not only attempts to control food supplies through cultivation but also domestication of animals. Like cultivation, successful domestication of animals for labor, food and resources took place over centuries. It is believed the relationship between humans and dogs goes back to about 40,000 BCE. Cows, goats, sheep, pigs, and other domestic animals appeared as domesticated livestock millennia later and significantly enhanced agricultural labor and food production. But greater control of food supplies also resulted in a dramatic increase in environmental impacts. Domestic animals had and have destructive impacts on soil due to overgrazing and the prevention of forest regrowth. In addition, actions taken to displace or even eliminate other mammals to be replaced with large domestic herds did, and continues to, contribute to habitat loss and species extinctions.

Early farmers also lived close to and were in constant contact with domesticated animals, and the evidence is clear that many devastating diseases that have plagued humanity for millennia came from viruses and bacteria which mutated from animal hosts to infect humans. These are called zoonotic diseases. Human immune systems have had to contend with numerous infections and epidemics that originated in animal populations such as smallpox, diphtheria, rubella, anthrax, bubonic plague, influenza, smallpox, and anthrax. Since species of domesticated animals differed based on regional location, so too did experiences with diseases and the build-up of immune systems. The Agricultural Revolution, specifically domestication of animals, ushered in the grim and often deadly scourge of epidemic diseases that have periodically ravaged settled societies to the present day

First Farmers of Southwest Asia [a.k.a., the Fertile Crescent]

In later chapters we will discuss Mesopotamia, the area between the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers that agriculture would make the “cradle of civilization.” (See Map 2.1). However, the incubator of Mesopotamian and Fertile Crescent agriculture and cultural patterns dated back to the foragers of the nearby Eastern Mediterranean, thousands of years before. The rye, barley, and wheat in West Asia were first harvested by late Pleistocene foragers called the Kebarans who ground wild wheat and barley into a porridge.[6]  Kebarans consumed the porridge as part of their broad spectrum diet that also included land mammals, birds, and sh. Advancing into the Holocene we see the “Natufan Adaptation,” where residents of this same area began to see the benefits of sedentary living in a precursor to the advent of agriculture. The Natufans consumed the same rye, barley, and wheat that their Kebaran predecessors had, but because their teeth were well-worn it appears they ate relatively more of it. Having a constant source of these grains enabled their eschewing long hunting or gathering sojourns; instead, the Natufans drew more of their meat from in and around Lake Huleh in modern Israel. Near Lake Huleh was Ain Mallaha, one of the earliest examples of year-round human settlement and an important precursor to sedentary agriculture.

Another permanent settlement in Southwest Asia seems to have been more directly responsible for the decision to domesticate grain rather than simply cultivate wild varieties. Abu Hureya in Syria was deeply affected by the Younger Dryas event of 11,000 years ago, an event which caused many of their wild food staples to disappear. Rather than migrating out of the area, the Abu Hureyrans cultivated rye. Soon afterward, other sites in the Levant began to see the planting of barley, while wheat was cultivated in both the Levant and Anatolia. [7]

 

The transition from foraging to collecting to cultivating took place over several centuries, but these gradual changes did serve to mark a very distinct era of permanent settlement during the Neolithic Period. Increased rainfall around 9600 BCE meant that the Jordan River would swell yearly, in the process depositing layers of fertile soil along its banks. This fertile soil allowed locals to rely on agriculture for survival. Soon after they founded Jericho just north of the Dead Sea: “perhaps the very first time in human history that a completely viable population was living in the same place at the same time.”[8]  By Jericho’s height, around 9000 BCE, the settlements population reached the hundreds. This increase cannot be considered an urban boom of course, and the transition away from foraging occurred gradually. For example, excavations from this area have unearthed no separation of tasks or dwellings by gender or skill. However, by the end of Jericho’s development, maintain-ing large populations in one place would prove to produce other extensive adjustments.[9]

 

 

Jericho’s residents did distinguish themselves from their hunter-gatherer predecessors, however, through their relatively extensive construction projects. They used mud bricks to build a wall that encircled the settlement probably for flood control, a tower, and separate buildings for grain storage.The former foragers now living at Jericho could rely on fish or other aquatic creatures for meat as they experimented with permanent settlement, but those foragers living further away from large bodies of water would need another source of meat. This need increasingly was met by animal domestication.

Domestication would prove to be a slow process, as humans learned the hard way that zebras bite, impalas are claustrophobic, and bighorn sheep do not obey orders. In other words, some animals cannot be domesticated, but this is information only under-stood through trial and error. By about 7,500 BCE, however, humans in the Taurus and Zagros mountains employed selective breeding to eventually domesticate mountain sheep and goats. The temperament and size of pigs and cows delayed their domestication until the 6,000s BCE, but this process proved equally, if not more important, than that of sheep and goats.

As agriculture and animal domestication progressed, settlements around the Mediterranean became larger and more sophisticated. By 7,000 BCE on the Anatolian plateau, Çatalhüyük reached several thousands of inhabitants. The residents at Çatalhüyük buried their dead, constructed uniform adjacent houses with elaborate designs painted on their interior walls, and had multiple workshops where (among other activities) they wove baskets, and made obsidian mirrors as well as daggers with “carved bone handles.”[10]  Catalhüyük denizens wove wool into cloth; developed a varied diet of peas, nuts, vegetable oil, apples, honey, and the usual grains; and improved weapons technology with sharper arrows added to their use of daggers and lances. These gains may seem modest by our standards, but the legacy of communal living and, ultimately, political centralization that they introduced was extraordinary.

 

 

Jericho and Çatalhüyük were surely some of the most notable early settlements, but they were not alone. The appearance of these two settlements was accompanied by the increasing presence of village life across the world. Most early agricultural villages in Southwest Asia and around the world were very similar in appearance; they had around twenty residents and were organized around grain cultivation and storage. Small huts were organized in a “loose circle,” and grain silos were placed between each hut. Labor was a communal activity, and village members all spent time hoeing the fields or hunting. The most valuable asset to a community was the grain itself, but neither it nor the land where it grew it belonged to one individual.

This model existed for hundreds and even thousands of years in some areas, until the villages stopped hunting and domesticated animals. For many scholars, the abandonment of hunting represents the “real” Neolithic Revolution. As communities completely abandoned hunting and gathering, they dedicated more energy to warfare, religion, and construction; in consequence, dwellings and settlements grew, along with a concomitant focus on tool and weapon making.[11]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The End of the Neolithic Era

 

At least two factors mark the transition from the prehistoric era to the ancient era. The first is the transition from stone to metal. Towards the end of the Neolithic era, copper metallurgy is introduced, which marks a transition period to the Bronze Age, sometimes referred to as the Chalcolithic or Eneolithic Era. Bronze is a mixture of copper and tin, which has greater hardness than copper, better casting properties, and a lower melting point. Bronze could be used for making weapons, something that was not possible with copper, which is not hard enough to endure combat conditions. In time, bronze became the primary material for tools and weapons, and a good part of the stone technology became obsolete, signaling the end of the Stone Age.

 

SUMMARY

The story of world civilizations really begins six to eight million years ago when ancestors of modern humans began to walk upright. Millions of years of evolutionary response to changing climates and environment led to the existence of our species, Homo sapiens. While other hominids migrated out of Africa, had language, and made fire and tools, it was Homo sapiens who were able to navigate open oceans and eventually populate the entire planet. Over the last 50,000 years or so, Homo sapiens became modern humans by improving their hunting, their building techniques, their community living, and their food gathering and storage. About 10,000 years ago, the Neolithic Era began. Humans began to live in larger, permanent settlements where a permanent food source needed to be nearby. These were the beginnings of agriculture. This “agricultural revolution” deeply affected gender relationships, class distinctions, and economic priorities as most humans left their foraging days behind them, the importance of which will be discussed in later chapters.

 

Neolithic developments in sedentary agriculture and village life established the foundations for an explosion of cultural development three thousand years later in Egypt and Mesopotamia. By the 1500s CE, most of the world had adopted agriculture as a primary means of subsistence, providing the bases for the flourishing of civilizations across the planet which, while diverse in many ways, share this reliance on an agricultural lifestyle. The way we live today is directly related to the advances made in the Neolithic Revolution. From the governments we live under, to the specialized work laborers do, to the trade of goods and food, humans were irrevocably changed by the switch to sedentary agriculture and domestication of animals. Human population swelled from five million to the nine billion of today.

Footnotes:

[1] Lauren Ristvet, In the Beginning: World History from Human Evolution to the First States (Boston: McGraw Hill, 2007), 36.

[2] Ristvet, 36-37.

[4] Scarre, 192, 215.

[5] Wayland Barber, Elizabeth Wayland Barber, Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years – Women, Cloth and Society in Early Times (New York: Norton, 1995).

[6] Ristvet, 41.

[7] Ristvet, 41-42.

[8] Steven Mithen, After the Ice: A Global Human History, 20,000 – 5,000 BC. (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003), 59.

[9] Robert Strayer, Ways of the World: A Brief Global History with Sources, 2nd ed (New York, Bedford St. Martins, 2013), 40.

[10] Mithen, 94.

[11] Ristvet, 66.

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