Global InformationNeolithic Revolution information
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The Neolithic Revolution, also known as the First Agricultural Revolution, was the wide-scale transition of many human cultures during the Neolithic period in Afro-Eurasia from a lifestyle of hunting and gathering to one of agriculture and settlement, making an increasingly large population possible.[1] These settled communities permitted humans to observe and experiment with plants, learning how they grew and developed.[2] This new knowledge led to the domestication of plants into crops.[2][3]
Archaeological data indicates that the domestication of various types of plants and animals happened in separate locations worldwide, starting in the geological epoch of the Holocene 11,700 years ago, after the end of the last Ice Age.[4] It was the world's first historically verifiable transition to agriculture. The Neolithic Revolution greatly narrowed the diversity of foods available, resulting in a decrease of the quality of human nutrition compared with that obtained previously from foraging,[5][6][7] but because food production became more efficient, it released humans to invest their efforts in other activities and was thus "ultimately necessary to the rise of modern civilization by creating the foundation for the later process of industrialization and sustained economic growth".[8]
The Neolithic Revolution involved much more than the adoption of a limited set of food-producing techniques. During the next millennia it transformed the small and mobile groups of hunter-gatherers that had hitherto dominated human pre-history into sedentary (non-nomadic) societies based in built-up villages and towns. These societies radically modified their natural environment by means of specialized food-crop cultivation, with activities such as irrigation and deforestation which allowed the production of surplus food. Other developments that are found very widely during this era are the domestication of animals, pottery, polished stone tools, and rectangular houses. In many regions, the adoption of agriculture by prehistoric societies caused episodes of rapid population growth, a phenomenon known as the Neolithic demographic transition.
These developments, sometimes called the Neolithic package,[9] provided the basis for centralized administrations and political structures, hierarchical ideologies,[10] depersonalized systems of knowledge (e.g. writing), densely populated settlements, specialization and division of labour, more trade, the development of non-portable art and architecture, and greater property ownership.[11] The earliest known civilization developed in Sumer in southern Mesopotamia (c. 6,500 BP); its emergence also heralded the beginning of the Bronze Age.[12]
The relationship of the aforementioned Neolithic characteristics to the onset of agriculture, their sequence of emergence, and empirical relation to each other at various Neolithic sites remains the subject of academic debate. It is usually understood to vary from place to place, rather than being the outcome of universal laws of social evolution.[13][14]
- ^ Jean-Pierre Bocquet-Appel (29 July 2011). "When the World's Population Took Off: The Springboard of the Neolithic Demographic Transition". Science. 333 (6042): 560–561. Bibcode:2011Sci...333..560B. doi:10.1126/science.1208880. PMID 21798934. S2CID 29655920.
- ^ a b Pollard, Elizabeth; Rosenberg, Clifford; Tigor, Robert (2015). Worlds together, worlds apart. Vol. 1 (concise ed.). New York: W.W. Norton & Company. p. 23. ISBN 978-0-393-25093-0.
- ^ Compare:Lewin, Roger (18 February 2009) [1984]. "35: The origin of agriculture and the first villagers". Human Evolution: An Illustrated Introduction (5 ed.). Malden, Massachusetts: John Wiley & Sons (published 2009). p. 250. ISBN 978-1-4051-5614-1. Retrieved 20 August 2017.
[...] The Neolithic transition involved increasing sedentism and social complexity, which was usually followed by the gradual adoption of plant and animal domestication. In some cases, however, plant domestication preceded sedentism, particularly in the New World.
- ^ "International Stratigraphic Chart". International Commission on Stratigraphy. Archived from the original on 12 February 2013. Retrieved 6 December 2012.
- ^ Armelagos, George J. (2014). "Brain Evolution, the Determinates of Food Choice, and the Omnivore's Dilemma". Critical Reviews in Food Science and Nutrition. 54 (10): 1330–1341. doi:10.1080/10408398.2011.635817. ISSN 1040-8398. PMID 24564590. S2CID 25488602.
- ^ Cite error: The named reference
:1was invoked but never defined (see the help page). - ^ Cite error: The named reference
Larsen2006was invoked but never defined (see the help page). - ^ Weisdorf, Jacob L. (September 2005). "From Foraging To Farming: Explaining The Neolithic Revolution" (PDF). Journal of Economic Surveys. 19 (4): 561–586. doi:10.1111/j.0950-0804.2005.00259.x. S2CID 42777045. Archived (PDF) from the original on 20 July 2018. Retrieved 12 June 2023.
- ^ Nowak, Marek (2022). "Do We Finally Know What the Neolithic Is?". Open Archaeology. 8 (1): 332–342. doi:10.1515/opar-2020-0204.
- ^ "Violence and its causes". unesdoc.unesco.org. Retrieved 18 October 2023.
- ^ Childe, Vere Gordon (1950). "The Urban Revolution". The Town Planning Review. 21 (1). Liverpool University Press: 3–17. doi:10.3828/tpr.21.1.k853061t614q42qh. ISSN 0041-0020. JSTOR 40102108. S2CID 39517784 – via JSTOR.
- ^ Violatti, Cristian (2 April 2018). "Neolithic Period". World History Encyclopedia.
- ^ "The Slow Birth of Agriculture" Archived 1 January 2011 at the Wayback Machine, Heather Pringle
- ^ "Wizard Chemi Shanidar". EMuseum. Minnesota State University. Archived from the original on 18 June 2008.