Neolithic Revolution
The Beginning of the Agricultural Revolution (or Neolithic Revolution)
I. For thousands of years, people survived by “hunting and gathering.” This means that they would hunt animals and gather any edible food they could find growing in the wild. Since the animals they hunted moved from place to place looking for their own food, people had to move from place to place too. People also moved with the seasons- travelling to warmer areas in the winter. Because they were often moving, we call these people nomads. Nomads spent most of their day looking for ways to feed themselves. They didn’t have much time for anything else. We call this period of time pre-history.
II. Then roughly 10,000 years ago, something truly revolutionary happened. Some people learned how to farm. This means they learned to plant crops and tame wild animals in order to use them for food and more. Learning to farm happened slowly over many years, and happened in different parts of the world at different times. The people who began farming the earliest were then able to do a lot of things that people in other parts of the world weren’t able to do. As you will soon learn, in some areas it was easy to domesticate (or tame) animals and plants, and in some places it was nearly impossible. Do you have any guesses about why that would be?
III.
Groups of people who lived in areas where it was easy to farm started to have huge advantages over groups who remained nomadic. Farming changed their lives and human history forever. This is because once people learned how to farm they stopped travelling around and started to settle in one place. They no longer had to move with the herds of animals so they built more permanent homes and started living in villages. Since they had fields of food to harvest and pens of animals to eat, they no longer had to spend their days looking for food. For the first time in history, people had more food than they needed. When people grow more food than they can use right away we say they have a surplus of food. Surplus means extra. Now that they had a surplus of food, they could spend their time doing other things that could improve their lives.
IV. A surplus of food meant a surplus of time. Humans now had time to explore their world. First they spent their time making better tools and improving their farming techniques. Eventually they started to do other things like making rules for people in the village so that people could all live together peacefully. Then different people began spending more time doing things they were good at or interested in. For example, some people worked on finding ways to heal sick people, some made decorations on pottery, some developed a way to write down their ideas, and others created songs, dances, and stories. Later, people began to study the world around them and come up with ideas about why things were the way they were. From this came the first ideas about religion, science and philosophy. This is the beginning of civilization and we call this time period ancient history.
V. These villages started to get bigger and bigger because the population was growing faster than ever before. This was because families are able to take care of more babies and children if they are settled in one place. When people are nomadic, they can only take care of one baby at a time, because it would need to be carried from place to place. They couldn’t take care of a second child until the first one was old enough to walk long distances, so people couldn’t have very large families. Once they settled, the population really started to grow.