SUBSISTENCE × SOCIETY

The Neolithic Revolution

~11,500 years ago

Neolithic · Neolithic · Holocene · Greenlandian

In the Fertile Crescent, about 11,500 years ago, people began sowing wild cereals and penning wild goats and sheep: farming had begun.

The neolithisation of the Fertile Crescent designates the shift, at the end of the last glacial period, from gathering and hunting to the tending of exploited species: sowing of still-wild wheats and barleys, penning of likewise wild goats and sheep. Plants and animals are managed at approximately the same period, at least 11,500 years ago, and the process unfolds in parallel across the whole region rather than from a single centre. Cereals presenting domestic characters become frequent only a millennium later, first in the southern and central Levant. The diagnostic character is retention of the grain on the stalk: a wild cereal fragments its ear to disperse its seed, so that a mutant retaining it can no longer reproduce alone and persists only if harvesting and resowing intervene. A grain that does not fall therefore signals a plant become dependent on people.

Why it matters

Agriculture alters the conditions of existence: it permits the maintenance of settled villages, which accumulate what a mobile group cannot transport, granaries, herds and landed property, and constitutes the condition of later urban agglomerations and state formations. World population, a few million individuals at the end of the glaciation, then begins a continuous growth. The species had existed for about three hundred thousand years at the time of the first cultivation.

Dating & uncertainty

Neolithisation has no single initial date. The management of still-wild species is attested at least 11,500 years ago, and the visible characters of domestication, increased grain size and skeletal modification, accumulate only over the following millennium, at variable dates by valley. Any single date constitutes a convention concerning which stage of the process is taken as the threshold.

Our species’ history as one day

23:07:2552 min 34 s before midnight

if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day