The Agricultural Revolution, also known as the Neolithic Revolution, refers to the period of time when hunter-gatherers around the world began to settle down to farm and domesticate animals. The Agricultural Revolution began around 12,000 years ago and took thousands of years.

For more than two million years, humans lived in small groups and roamed around large areas, hunting animals and gathering wild plants. But around 12,000 years ago (10,000 BCE), people started to settle down to farm and domesticate animals. Why we began farming is disputed, but it changed everything in human lives – irreversibly.

Roughly 18,000 years ago, the last ice age began to give way to global warming. The climate became more stable and wetter, ideal for grains to grow. Besides, animals that flourished in the cold – woolly rhinos, mammoths, and other megafauna – were all set for extinction. Therefore, the domestication of plants and animals may have been easier and needed for a regular food supply.

Farming started in the Middle East and sprang up in other parts of the world independently – for example, people in Central America domesticated maize, Chinese farmers learnt how to grow rice, and New Guineans tamed sugar without knowing anything about wheat cultivation in ancient Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq).

Change in lifestyle didn’t happen overnight. Instead, it took thousands of years. At first, certain grains began to flourish in the wild, allowing people to eat more of them. Over time, people learnt how to cultivate crops. They discovered that sowing seeds deep into the ground gave better results than scattering them on the surface. They learnt to pluck weeds, prevent parasites, and water and fertilize plantations to achieve better harvest. Eventually, farming took so much time that permanent villages began to build up next to the fields.

Giving up the nomadic lifestyle allowed women to have more children,¹ while farming provided enough food for a growing number of people. From 10,000 BCE (12,000 YA) to the first century CE, the human population on Earth increased from a few million to 250 million. Most were farmers, and only one or two million remained hunter-gatherers.

Though the Agricultural Revolution gave humans a more regular food supply, it had other, less desirable consequences. The diet became less nutritious and exposed people to deficiency diseases. A denser population in villages gave birth to crowding diseases, increasing epidemics, and sexually transmitted diseases began to spread from exploited domesticated animals. People became shorter and weaker, too.

Along with permanent settlements, private property emerged. People had to protect their assets from thieves and other villages. Fortresses were built, and wars erupted. Ruthless persons became kings, and social classes began to form – people became increasingly unequal. Besides, the differences in gender roles began to grow as women needed more time to nurture and raise children at home.

Villages, however, remained relatively small for thousands of years.² Towns started to appear once the grain surplus was large enough that not all needed to grow their own food – some could become tailors, soldiers, priests, and such. Larger cities, kingdoms, and empires began to form when the first writing systems let people keep track of the increasing amount of information needed to control larger collectives.

¹ Hunter-gatherer women could raise only one child at a time because they always had to carry the child with them while searching for food until the child could walk independently. Permanent homes next to grain fields allowed women to give birth to babies more often.

² The largest villages more than 10,000 years ago, such as Jericho, contained, more or less, a few hundred individuals. A millennium or two later, Catalhöyük in Turkey, probably the most significant settlement at the time, had between 5,000 and 10,000 inhabitants. The first towns with a population of more than ten thousand began to emerge in Fertile Crescent (a boomerang-shaped area from Egypt to Mesopotamia) in the fifth and fourth millennia BCE, more than 6,000 years ago.

Bibliography

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