Neolithic Revolution: Agriculture's Transformative Impact

The Neolithic Revolution was the wide-scale transition of many human cultures from a lifestyle of hunting to one of agriculture, allowing the ability to support an increasingly large population. Archaeological data indicates that the training of various types of plants and animals evolved in separate locations worldwide. It was the world's first historically verifiable revolution in agriculture.

The Neolithic Revolution involved far more than the adoption of a limited set of food-producing techniques. During the next eras it would transform the small and mobile groups of hunter-gatherers that had hitherto dominated human pre-history into sedentary societies based in built-up villages and towns. These societies radically modified their natural

environment by means of specialized food-crop cultivation which allowed extensive surplus food production. These developments provided the basis for heavily populated settlements, specialization and division of labour, trading economies, the development of non-portableart and architecture, centralized administrations and political structures, hierarchical ideologies, depersonalized systems of knowledge, and propertyownership. Personal, land and private property ownership led to classified society, class struggle and armies. The first full-blown manifestation of the entire Neolithic complex is seen in the Middle Eastern Sumerian cities, whose emergence also heralded the beginning of the Bronze Age.
The relationship of the above-mentioned 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 educational debate, and varies from place to place, rather than being the outcome of universal laws of social evolution.

The term Neolithic Revolution was coined in 1923 by V. Gordon Childe to describe the first in a series of agricultural revolutions in Middle Eastern history. The period is described as a "revolution" to denote its importance, and the great significance and degree of change affecting the communities in which new agricultural practices were gradually adopted and refined.

The beginning of this process in different regions has been dated from 10,000 to 8,000 BC in theFertile Crescent and perhaps 8000 BC in the Kuk Early Agricultural Site of Melanesia to 2500 BC in Subsaharan Africa, with some considering the developments of 9000–7000 BC in the Fertile Crescent to be the most important. This transition everywhere seems associated with a change from a largely nomadic hunter-gatherer way of life to a more settled, agrarian-based one, with the inception of the domestication of various plant and animal species, depending on the species locally available, and probably also influenced by local culture. Recent archaeological research suggests that in some regions such as the Southeast Asian peninsula, the transition from hunter-gatherer to agriculturalist was not

linear, but region-specific.
There are several competing theories as to the factors that drove populations to take up agriculture. The most prominent of these are:
Once agriculture started gaining momentum, human activity resulted in the selective breeding of cereal grasses, and not simply of those that would favour greater caloric returns through larger seeds. Plants that possessed traits such as small seeds or bitter taste would have been seen as undesirable. Plants that rapidly shed their seeds on maturity tended not to be gathered at harvest, therefore not stored and not seeded the following season; years of harvesting selected for strains that retained their edible seeds longer.
Several plant species, the "pioneer crops" or Neolithic founder crops were named by Daniel Zohary, who highlighted importance of the three cereals, and suggesting domestication of flax, pea, chickpea, bitter vetch and lentil came a little later. Based on analysis of thegenes of domesticated plants, he preferred theories of a single, or at most a very small number of domestication events for each taxa that spread in an arc from the Levantine corridor around the fertile crescent and later into Europe. Gordon Hillman and Stuart Davies carried out experiments with wild wheat varieties to show that the process of domestication would have happened over a relatively short period of between twenty and two hundred years. Some of these pioneering attempts failed at first and crops were abandoned, sometimes to be taken up again and successfully domesticated thousands of years later: rye, tried and abandoned in Neolithic Anatolia, made its way to Europe as weed seeds and was successfully domesticated in Europe, thousands of years after the earliest agriculture. Wild lentils present a different challenge that needed to be overcome: most of the wild seeds do not germinate in the first year; the first evidence of lentil domestication, breaking dormancy in their first year, was found in the early Neolithic at Jerf el Ahmar, and quickly spread south to the Native site in the Jordan Valley. This process of training allowed the founder crops to adapt and eventually become larger, more easily harvested, more dependable in storage and more useful to the human population
When hunter-gathering began to be replaced by sedentary food production it became more profitable to keep animals close at hand.

Therefore, it became necessary to bring animals permanently to their settlements, although in many cases there was a distinction between relatively sedentary farmers and nomadic herders. The animals' size, temperament, diet, mating patterns, and life span were factors in the desire and success in domesticating animals. Animals that provided milk, such as cows and goats, offered a source of protein that was renewable and therefore quite valuable. The animal’s ability as a worker, as well as a food source, also had to be taken into account. Besides being a direct source of food, certain animals could provide leather, wool, hides, and fertilizer. Some of the earliest domesticated animals included dogs sheep, goats, cows, and

pigs