Neolithic Revolution: How Farming Began, Textbook

A warmer world

The scene opens at the end of the last cold age. About 11,700 years ago the Ice Age ended, and the climate became warmer and wetter. Geologists call the new era the Holocene. People lived as hunters and gatherers in bands of a few dozen, moving with the seasons and following herds of gazelle and deer. We know this from the remains of their camps: hearths, stone points, animal bones and the seeds of wild plants. It was not a poor life, but it had one limit. The land could feed only as many people as it offered wild food.

Seeds in the Fertile Crescent

In a wide arc of land from the Jordan Valley through south-eastern Turkey to Iraq, people gathered wild wheat, barley, peas and lentils. Between about 11,500 and 10,000 years ago, they began to sow the seeds themselves. Slowly the plants changed, because people kept the seed from stalks that did not drop their grains on the ground. Archaeologists see this in ancient grains, and DNA points to the hills of south-eastern Turkey as the home of cultivated einkorn wheat. A new way of living had begun, and it did not need hunters to move.

Göbekli Tepe

On a hill in south-eastern Turkey stands a surprise. About 11,600 years ago, hunter-gatherers raised T-shaped stone pillars there, some about five metres tall, and carved them with foxes, snakes and wild boar. Most scholars think few people lived on the hill all year, and no farming has been found beside the earliest rings. It was probably a place where far-away groups met. It shows that large building could come before farming. One theory goes further and says that the need to feed all the builders helped push people to cultivate grain.

Tamed animals

People also tamed animals. The first was the dog: wolves that came to human camps for scraps became companions more than 15,000 years ago, long before any farm. Around 10,500 years ago, in the same region as the first wheat, people began to keep sheep and goats, and soon cattle and pigs. Bones tell the story. In herds that are kept, the animals are smaller and the young males are killed more often than the females. Animals gave meat, milk, wool and muscle power, and their dung fed the fields.

A village in Anatolia

Now the village grows. Çatalhöyük, in what is now Turkey, flourished about 9,000 years ago, and several thousand people may have lived there. Its mud-brick houses were packed wall to wall with no streets between them. You climbed a ladder to the roof and went in through a hole, which was also the chimney. Inside, walls were plastered and sometimes painted, and the dead were buried under the floors. Roofs worked as the town’s squares. It is a World Heritage Site, and its houses show us what daily life looked like at the dawn of villages.

Invented again and again

Farming was not invented only once. In China, people grew rice along the Yangtze and millet along the Yellow River about 9,000 years ago. In Mexico they bred maize from a wild grass called teosinte at about the same time. In the highlands of New Guinea people drained wetlands to grow taro, bananas and sugar cane, and in Africa they cultivated sorghum, yams and African rice. Why did it happen on several continents within a few thousand years? One theory says that the warm, steady climate after the Ice Age made planting pay off.

What farming changed

A field feeds many more people than the same land can in the wild. Villages grew, families had more children, and grain could be stored for winter. Stored food brought something new: property, and with it the first big differences between rich and poor. Farming also had a price. Skeletons of early farmers are often shorter and have worse teeth, and living close to crowds and animals let diseases such as measles and flu cross from animals to people. There was no way back. Surplus food would soon support rulers, priests, craftsmen and, in the next chapter, writing.

The First Farmers