The Neolithic Revolution

The story

From gathering to sowing

Imagine a field of wild wheat, 12,000 years ago. The ears are small and it takes only a gust of wind for the ripe grains to fall to the ground and scatter: it is the way the plant reproduces. Anyone who wants to harvest has to arrive at just the right moment, with a basket, and carry away only what has not already fallen. Now imagine someone who, every year, takes the seeds from the most useful plants, the ones with ears that stay attached, and sows them near home. In a short time, over many generations, that wheat is no longer the same: it has bigger ears and grains that do not fall by themselves. It has become a domesticated plant.

This process, repeated for thousands of years by different people in different places, is what we call the Neolithic Revolution. The name, which means “of the new stone”, was made famous by the Australian archaeologist Vere Gordon Childe, who in 1936 wrote a very successful book called “Man Makes Himself”. Childe used the word “revolution” to stress the greatness of the change. Today scholars point out that it was not a quick revolution: it lasted thousands of years and went forward in small steps.

The Fertile Crescent

The first place where it happened was a belt of land shaped like a crescent moon, running from the Jordan valley, through Syria and southern Turkey, to Mesopotamia and the mountains of Iran: the Fertile Crescent, a name given in 1916 by the American Egyptologist James Henry Breasted. Here many plants suited to cultivation grew wild: two kinds of wheat (the small one, called einkorn, and emmer), barley, lentils, peas, chickpeas and flax. Archaeologists call them “founder crops”. The animals were there too: the wild ancestors of sheep, goats, pigs and cattle.

The first crops are dated to about 11,500 to 10,000 years ago. A little later came the animals: goats and sheep in the mountains, pigs and cattle in the lower areas. Domestication, that is, the process by which a species changes until it depends on humans, took centuries.

Before the village or after?

It is not clear which came first. At the site of Göbekli Tepe, in south-eastern Turkey, recognised in 1994 by the German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt, there are enormous T-shaped stone pillars, up to five and a half metres tall, decorated with carved animals, built about 11,500 years ago. According to many scholars they were raised by hunter-gatherers, before agriculture was widespread. This suggests that perhaps gathering for shared ceremonies pushed people to farm in order to feed so many, and not the other way round. Other scholars propose different explanations. There are also hints of much older “proto-cultivation”: at Ohalo II, on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, about 23,000 years ago, the seeds of weeds that grow in fields show that someone may already have been tending plants.

More places, more beginnings

It was not a single invention. Agriculture arose independently in several parts of the world. In China, along the Yangtze, rice was grown, and along the Yellow River millet, about 9,000 to 10,000 years ago. In Mexico maize was domesticated from a wild plant, teosinte, which looks like a grass with a few grains: it happened about 9,000 years ago. In the Andes the potato arose, in New Guinea the banana and taro, in the African Sahel sorghum, in North America the sunflower. The idea of the Russian botanist Nikolai Vavilov, who in the 1920s travelled all over the world collecting seeds, was that there are some “centres of origin” of cultivated plants.

From the Near East, then, farmers moved outwards. About 9,000 years ago they reached Greece, about 8,000 years ago Italy and about 6,000 years ago northern Europe. Studies of ancient DNA show that it was not just the idea that spread, but the people too: the descendants of the first Anatolian farmers mixed with the local hunters.

A huge change, but not only a good one

With agriculture the amount of food for each hectare of land grew enormously. A community could feed more people, and populations grew. But the skeletons of the first farmers often show more tooth decay, shorter stature and signs of dietary deficiencies compared with hunters: they ate less variety of foods, depended on the harvest and lived in close contact with animals, from which new diseases came. Some scholars, such as the writer Jared Diamond, have even called agriculture “the worst mistake in the history of the human race”. It is an extreme opinion, but it reminds us that every great turning point has a price.