Milestones
Neolithic Revolution
Also Known As First Agricultural Revolution
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The turn from foraging to farming, beginning around 10000 BC in the Fertile Crescent and arising independently in China, Mesoamerica, the Andes, New Guinea, Africa and eastern North America. It is the deepest transition in human history, making possible settlement, surplus, cities, states and writing, and its causes are still genuinely unsettled, a question this atlas carries as open rather than answered.
Facts
Milestone Year Whencirca 10000 BC onward, in multiple independent centers 1 LocationFertile Crescent first, then independently in at least six other world regions 1 Cross-Tradition Connections
Sources
1. Neolithic Revolution (Wikipedia)
Wikimedia FoundationAgricultural transition sectionQuote, Agricultural transition section
The beginning of this process in different regions has been dated from 10,000 to 8,000 BCE in the Fertile Crescent
V. Gordon Childe (Wikipedia)
Wikimedia Foundationmain textQuote, main text
a period of radical change, in which humans, who were then hunter-gatherers, began cultivating plants and breeding animals for food, allowing for greater control of the food supply and population growth
Open Questions (1 open question)
Why did agriculture begin at all, after two hundred thousand years of successful foraging?
Farming arose independently in at least seven world regions within a few thousand years of the last glacial period's end, which demands a general explanation, yet no proposed driver has won the field: end-of-ice-age climate change, population pressure, resource abundance making settlement possible, social competition and feasting, and cultural or religious change all have serious advocates, and early farmers were by skeletal evidence often worse nourished than the foragers they replaced, so the move was not an obvious improvement to those who made it.
What would resolve this A mechanism that correctly predicts where and when domestication did and did not begin across the independent centers, tested against the archaeological, climatic and genetic records together rather than fitted to one region.
Archaeology, Agronomy, PaleoclimatologyNeolithic Revolution (Wikipedia)
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