The Neolithic Revolution The Great Transition

1. The Neolithic Revolution The Great Transition

2. Before the Great Revolution

3. PALEOLITHIC HUMANS or OLD STONE AGE HUMANS hunted and gather for well over 100,000 years as fully modern human beings

5. Hunting and Gathering Key Questions 1: What are the major differences between hunting and gathering, and settled agriculture? 2: What is Pastoralism? 3: What was the interaction between the different groups?

6. *By 12,000 years ago, small groups of hunters and gatherers had migrated virtually everywhere on the globe • *These groups were extremely nomadic • They exploited many resources lightly as apposed to exploiting a few resources heavily • They moved seasonally to find the best available food • In such small and mobile communities there was little room or time for material goods or specialized systems • Ownership was rare and when it did occur it was communal • Constant movement meant that these communities could only support a small child- to-adult ratio

7. Archeologists estimate that the activity of gathering in temperate and tropic areas provided 75 to 80% of the total calories consumed, with hunting providing the balance. In present hunting and gathering cultures, women usually do most of the gathering, while the men specialize in hunting. This kind of gender specialization is by no means universal, but there is little specialization of roles beyond this within these groups. Hunter-gatherers accumulate a large and intimate knowledge of their range and the food sources, dangers, and opportunities. This knowledge is largely communal. Hunter gatherer societies typically enjoy a surprisingly diverse diet and abundant leisure. They live in a small, personal world defined by the band, which seldom consists of more than 50 to 250 people. Since young people usually marry outside of the band and hunter gatherers have no accumulated wealth to steal, their attitude toward outsiders tends to be cautiously friendly rather than hostile.

8. In such small, continuously moving communities, there is little opportunity for economic or other kinds of specialization to develop. What one person knows and believes, the entire group tends to know and believe. Life is communal; cultural and technical knowledge and skills are widely diffused. A rough egalitarianism tends to prevail, and there are no sharp social distinctions. Some individuals may enjoy more status than others, but there are few if any class distinctions

12. For various reason, many unknown, the populations of these nomadic hunting and gathering communities tended to remain in stable harmony with the amount of available resources.

13. But, the great climate changes at the end of the last Ice Age would disrupt this harmony throughout the world and start a revolution!

15. Domestication Questions to consider:1)What are the characteristic plants and animals exploited by the early regional civilizations [the Near East, South Asia, the Far East, sub-Sahara Africa, North and South America]? 2)How did Old World agriculturists remedy the inadequacies of a diet based on barley, wheat, or millet? 3)Why is Old World agriculture, unlike New World [ancient American] agriculture, always associated with domesticated animals?

16. Agriculture means sedentism • Living permanently in one place. This was itself new to human beings, and it may have seemed very constraining to the first people to experience this way of life. Living in one spot permanently means exploiting a relatively small amount of land very intensively (rather than exploiting a large amount of land extensively, as hunter-gatherers did), and over a long period of time. • To understand how radical this change was, it is necessary to consider carefully both the advantages and disadvantages of gaining one's living from one piece of ground and the effects of such a way of life on the environment.

17. Sedentary Agriculture • Questions to consider about the emergence of agriculture: • When and why did agriculture emerge as a way of life? • Why is agriculture necessary to the development of civilization? • What are some of the advantages of sedentism as a way of life? • What are some of the problems that peoples adapting to a sedentary agricultural life have to overcome? For example, a. Why do agriculturists tend to have larger families than hunter-gatherers?b. Why are agricultural villages more vulnerable--and inviting-- to attack than villages of hunter-gatherers?c. How did early agriculturists deal with the problem of security? How did they protect the fruits of their labor?d. Why were early agriculturists particularly vulnerable to disease?e. Why were some of the earliest agricultural sites eventually abandoned by their inhabitants?f. To what extent have these problems been solved?

18. The Emergence of Sedentary Agriculture The earliest agricultural sites in the world have been found in the Near East: in the Nile Valley and Western Asia, in valleys of the Zagros Mountains in Iran, in Anatolia (modern Turkey, shown above), in northern Syria, and along the Jordan River valley. Around 10,000 to 12,000 years ago, agriculture began to emerge as a new specialized way of life, replacing hunting and gathering. In this region of the world, the changes in climate which accompanied the most recent retreat of the glaciers may have triggered the development of agriculture.

20. Technology Necessary for Agriculture Questions to consider:1)What were the technological changes necessary to sustain the new sedentary, agricultural mode of life? 2)What were the cultural changes necessary? 3)What are some of the advantages of economic specialization? Why did it begin to occur shortly after agriculture emerged as a way of life? 4) Surprisingly, this dramatically new way of life was not very dependent on new technology. On the contrary, in the earliest phase of development, pioneer farmers used techniques and tools which had long been familiar to hunter-gatherers: the stone axe, hoe, and sickle for preparation of the fields and harvesting the grain. 5)Profound cultural rather than technological changes were necessary at first to permit adaptation to the new mode of life. But once the shift had occurred, ever more changes, both cultural and technological, became possible.

21. Specialization • The specializations are almost endless--and they continue in our own times. The earliest were: bakers, brewers, weavers, dyers, carpenters, potters, stone and metal-workers, farmers, soldiers, priests (interpreting signs), medicine men and women (shamans and healers), merchants, artists, scribes, story tellers, teachers, slaves, and kings. • Priests or shamans and healers had probably existed in the earlier hunter-gatherer societies • As technological specializations accumulated, the sum total of knowledge in the community soon exceeded the capacity of any individual mind. Specialized (and often written) forms of knowledge were no longer sharable throughout the community, but instead became the "property" of special groups (elite classes).

26. In contrast to hunting and gathering as a mode of life, agriculture means modifying the environment in order to exploit it more effectively. Agriculture alters both the animals and plants it domesticates. Ultimately, it changes the very landscape itself. • The growing of a single crop in a field by definition substitutes a biological monoculture for the complex ecological system that existed on the same ground previously. This change has several effects. The intended effect of crop-growing is that the quantity of food stuffs (wheat in this case) desired by the human farmer is greatly increased. One unintended effect is that the nutrients in the soil necessary to the growing of this particular plant are depleted. • There are other unintended effects of crop-growing. The human farmers are consciously altering the environment and "selecting for" the plants they need for food or fiber. Unwittingly, they are also "selecting for" any organism that can live on wheat: wheat-eating "vermin," pathogens, and diseases of wheat, etc. • Thus, paradoxically, by increasing their food supply, farmers simultaneously increased threats to their food supply.

27. In the Near East, many varieties of the wild cereal grasses, wheat and barley were exploited as major food sources. • The act of harvesting the wild grains changed them genetically. Over time, the percentage of wheat and barley seed that falls off the stalk when ripe declined--which made harvesting much easier. In this way, these crops were "domesticated" to the point where they cannot reproduce themselves without human intervention. Other qualities, such as the size and number of the kernals, also changed over time, due to human activities.

32. Processing Cereal Grains Sometimes this threshingof the grain is achieved by flailing piles of grain with a club or by treading on it. In the background at left, a man is winnowing the threshed grain by tossing it into the air with a shovel: gravity returns the heavier grains to the pile at his feet while a breeze separates the light chaff and blows it away.

35. Humans must process the grain before it can be eaten. Human teeth, jaws, and digestive tract are not adapted for this kind of diet. The solution to this problem is, however, was technological, not evolutionally. • One early and universal technique of transforming grain into food is to mill the seeds slightly between two stones and then to boil the grain in water, making a kind of gruel. If ground into coarse meal, boiling in water will produce something like the oatmeal. If ground fine and mixed with water into a paste and then baked, the grain is transformed into bread. The yeast cultures which leaven some forms of bread are naturally occurring, but were regarded as magical. • If stored grain gets wet and begins to convert into sugar. While the grain is spoiled for bread-making, it can still be consumed if treated in another process called fermentation. The sprouted grain is first baked, ground into a paste (called malt), and then added to water. The result is beer, another food invention that also preserved water.

38. Baking Technology that Enhances and Preserves The familiar baking-oven has been enlarged and modified into a high-temperature kiln for firing pottery. Agricultural societies world-wide have discovered that "baking" clay in extremely hot fires for a long period creates hard, durable objects such as the plates, jugs, and pots above. These examples are from 'Ubaid' culture in Mesopotamia, one of the earliest pottery-making societies. Another step in a sequence of technological development was the modification of the pottery kiln into a furnace capable of melting metal ores

43. Pottery • Another advantage of sedentary life is the ability to use household objects made of baked clay. Hunter- gatherers have no use for pottery because they have to carry their possessions with them. Agriculturalists, in contrast, can accumulate This discovery was made many times by human communities all over the globe, and seems to have occurred almost as soon as they settled down in one place. • The wheel may have first been developed--invented--for these purposes rather than for use in vehicles. In any case, the settled mode of life led to many new discoveries out of which elaborate technologies eventually developed.

45. Weaving The discovery of techniques for turning plant and animal fibers into cloth represented a revolutionary improvement in the quality of human life. Weaving may have preceded agriculture, as it grew naturally out of basketry and the weaving of reed mats. Life in sedentary agricultural villages permitted the refinement of ancient techniques and the adoption of more complex looms, as shown above.

47. Across the Pond - A wholly distinctive and different agriculture grew up in the New World, in Meso-America and South America. Large domestic animals were absent in these ancient economies. The explanation for the contrast with the Old World is not hard to find: their main food plants: 1) corn (maize), 2)squash, and 3) beans (add potatoes in South America) provide all 12 of the necessary amino acids and a complete diet. -Supplementary foods included tomatoes and peppers, which have spread all over the world since 1492.

48. Maize was first domesticated in Meso-America several thousand years ago. It became the main food crop of many cultures from eastern North America to Chile in South America. So central was maize-growing in the Americas that the Mayas regarded themselves as having been created by the gods out of maize. Maize was highly adaptable and flourished in such diverse climates throughout the Americas. • Maize has advantages over wheat or barley. Seed-bed preparation can be accomplished with a digging stick (No Plow). Harvest is easier and the standing crop is less easily spoiled by moisture or wind. Most importantly, the return on seeds planted was as high as 45 to 1 at a very early date. In contrast, early wheat farmers may have realized only a 6-1 return on seeds planted.

50. Domestication of Animals • The same kinds of genetic transformations occurred in the animals domesticated by early farmers and pastoralists. The process of selective breeding of animals was at first unintentional and probably unobserved. For example, large, aggressive, and big-horned bulls were probably too dangerous to keep around and so did not survive to reproduce these characteristics. Thus, over time, early farmers unwittingly altered the genetic make-up of the life forms they most relied on • Modifications of body size reflecting the uses to which the animal is put, loss of speed and agility, loss or decrease in size of horns or other natural weapons, biological specialization for human needs (e.g., wool production in sheep), occurred. Subtler changes in disposition and intelligence occurred also. Some species of domestic animals could not now survive without human care and protection.