What is the significance of the agricultural neolithic revolution

Similarly, when we talk about necessary eco-geographic conditions, we immediately think of edible plants and animals suitable for domestication.

However, a critical resource may not necessarily be a food resource. For instance, during the Neolithic period agriculture was highly dependent on stone tools, especially on stone axes used for forest clearance. Although they were not a staple food, stone tools were therefore a critical resource for the agricultural system indeed some of these stones especially obsidian were traded on several hundred kilometers from their origin area 54 which confirms that they were highly valuable.

Therefore, resource endowments were important in enabling agriculture to become established while they were not unimportant for its sustainability; institutions assumed increasing importance after agriculture was established and were also important for continuing development. In other words, both factors were important but their relative importance varied along the development path of the agricultural system. For instance, human capital accumulation and intergenerational transmission of knowledge were also necessary conditions; 4 consequently a symbol system 18 was required for that purpose.

According to a recent publication, 55 this combined influence of both factors could be explained through the following mechanism.

If we consider any center e. Eurasia where initially agriculture emerged, we must distinguish between the core and the periphery of this region. In the core e. This is because the institutions implemented in the core were extractive.

In the periphery e. Despite their later start, these countries are nowadays more developed compared to the Near-Eastern countries - because their institutions were inclusive from the beginning. Therefore, this third view assumes a degree of mutual causation between natural endowments and institutions. In other words, particular types of economic growth facilitated the development of particular institutions and social structures. However, with the introduction of metalworking, they became less valuable.

Current evidence suggests that the Neolithic materialistic culture was introduced to Europe via western Anatolia; this is the so-called neolithization process. Genetic data suggest that no independent domestication of animals took place in Neolithic Europe and that all domesticated animals were originally domesticated in Southwest Asia.

It is therefore widely accepted that the onset of agriculture in the Near-East triggered a cultural change that diffused farming and associated technologies across Europe starting about 10, years ago. The information provided by archaeological remains and the trajectory of straight and short line paths suggest the estimated speed of agricultural spread was approximately 1 kilometer per year.

Despite these evidences, the Neolithic diffusion or the neolithization process of Europe has always been a controversial issue, 57 , 19 not really solvable with known archaeological methods. Or did people from other places learn about innovations from trade or other relationships such as intermarriage? In other words, a major debate 58 in the study of earliest European farmers is whether they were colonists who settled in the major river valleys of North-Central Europe or whether they were local hunter-gatherers who adopted domestic plants and animals coming from the Near-East?

However, it is now widely agreed that the introduction of agriculture and the simultaneous replacement of the Jomon culture by the Yayoi were the result of a major incursion from mainland Asia.

Among these two alternative demographic scenarios proposed to account for the Neolithic transition, the first one was 21 and still is 59 the most popular in the academic literature.

This scenario is called the demic diffusion model 22 or, more usually, the migrationist approach. In the demic diffusion model, the spread of technologies involved a massive movement of people. The demic diffusion is a kind of replacement model. It posits that there was a significant migration of farmers from the Fertile Crescent into Europe.

Given their technological advantages these migrants would have displaced or absorbed the less numerous hunter-gathering populace. If the demic diffusion model is the most popular explanation of the neolithization process, it is because it is based on a mechanism similar to competition among species - or natural selection present in biological evolutionary theory.

We know that the Neolithic revolution is featured by a transition from foraging to farming and that both economic systems - food procurement and food production - have advantages and drawbacks. However, agriculture has for a long time ago essentially taken over the world and hunting and gathering is now found only in very marginal and supposedly "backwards" area. Such situation is implicitly explained by the existence of a tradeoff between having more leisure and better nutrition versus simply being able to feed more mouths.

Any given person may well choose to have a more varied and interesting diet and more free time than to be able to feed more people but otherwise be more miserable. If the latter option wins out in the end, most explanations in the academic literature are based on a vision which, implicitly or not, is an evolutionary process. As for the development of any given species a plant or an animal , the development of human societies is assumed to be greatly determined by what strategies produce the most offspring.

In any biological evolutionary competition, the strategy that produces the most children generation after generation will eventually win over strategies that allow the production of fewer children no matter how happy or unhappy those children are. So agricultural societies simply fed more people, allowed for larger families and so could push out, absorb or slaughter the hunter-gathering societies in the long run.

Therefore, demographic pressure is generally considered to be the prime mover of the Neolithic expansion. Childe Cavalli-Sforza Nevertheless, the migrationist approach has two shortcomings: it minimizes the role of cultural diffusion and overemphasizes the role of competition between HG and farmers. In doing so, it rejects the possibility that HG could have decided, without constraint, to adopt agriculture.

However, the main rationale - which is the most often cited in the literature to explain the immigration of Neolithic farmers from the Near-East to Europe - i.

Moreover, the presumed competition between HG and farmers, which is implicit in the migrationist approach, does not find support in ecological evidence. Indeed, before the late Neolithic, there is no indication of extensive agriculture such as woodland clearances and environmental degradation i. On the one hand, farmers settled exclusively in specific areas that were suitable for agriculture i.

It should be noted that loess land was the best land for farmers while, with its dense lime stands, it was poor in game and yielded hardly any vegetable produce, i.

On the other hand, HG populations were much more attracted by coastal and lacustrine regions and along major rivers. Despite the previous conclusions, the total neolithization of Europe by cultural diffusion is not obvious. As stated previously see section 2 , in its early stages, the superiority of agriculture over foraging was uncertain, especially for complex HG societies. This has led to a third explanation of the spread of agriculture, mixing migration and imitation.

Thus, cultural diffusion cannot be neglected, but demic diffusion was the most important mechanism in this major historical process at the continental scale. Firstly, it relies on leapfrog colonization rather than on massive folk migration or demic diffusion.

This denotes a selective colonization of an area by small groups, who target optimal areas for cultivation usually, loess land. These groups are thus forming an enclave settlement among native inhabitants or HG. Thirdly contact exists through trade within the framework of regional or extra-regional trading networks. Archaeologically, ethnographically and ecologically, the migrationist approach as well as the cultural one finds little evidence to explain the agricultural diffusion in Europe.

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In the early twentieth century, archaeologists were steadily accumulating data about past societies using a conceptual framework based on tools and technology. Despite this universal agreement, many debates and controversies among scholars remain about the Neolithic revolution, its causes, features and consequences.

These vivid controversies overwhelmed traditional debates between different schools of thoughts and between different scientific fields.

They result from the fact that the transition to agriculture encompasses a wide range of causes and consequences that are themselves multidimensional - economic, social, anthropological, ecological, biological, institutional and technical.

Future researches on the Neolithic revolution should require, maybe more than on others topics, more interdisciplinary approaches.

Author declares there is no conflict of interest in publishing the article. Harlan JR. Crops and Man. Bowles S. Cultivation of cereals by the first farmers was not more productive than foraging. Proc Natl Acad Sci. Biol Lett. Smith VL. Humankind in Prehistory: Economy, Ecology and Institutions.

Svizzero S, Tisdell C. Rivista di Storia Economica. Svizzero S. Population Pressure and the Transition to Agriculture. Global Journal of Human-Social Science. Research in Economic Anthropology. Measuring the rate of spread of early farming in Europe. Zvelebil M. The agricultural transition and the origins of Neolithic society in Europe, Documenta Praehistorica.

Vizzero S. Sahlins M. Stone Age Economics. Tavistock, England; Weisdorf JL. Journal of Economic Surveys. Stock JT, Pinhasi R. Changing paradigms in our understanding of the transition to agriculture: Human bioarchaeology, behavior and adaptation. Civilizations and cities grew out of the innovations of the Neolithic Revolution. Neolithic humans used stone tools like their earlier Stone Age ancestors, who eked out a marginal existence in small bands of hunter-gatherers during the last Ice Age.

Australian archaeologist V. The advent of agriculture separated Neolithic people from their Paleolithic ancestors. Many facets of modern civilization can be traced to this moment in history when people started living together in communities. There was no single factor that led humans to begin farming roughly 12, years ago. The causes of the Neolithic Revolution may have varied from region to region.

The Earth entered a warming trend around 14, years ago at the end of the last Ice Age. Some scientists theorize that climate changes drove the Agricultural Revolution. In the Fertile Crescent , bounded on the west by the Mediterranean Sea and on the east by the Persian Gulf, wild wheat and barley began to grow as it got warmer.

Pre-Neolithic people called Natufians started building permanent houses in the region. Other scientists suggest that intellectual advances in the human brain may have caused people to settle down.

Religious artifacts and artistic imagery—progenitors of human civilization—have been uncovered at the earliest Neolithic settlements. The Neolithic Era began when some groups of humans gave up the nomadic, hunter-gatherer lifestyle completely to begin farming. It may have taken humans hundreds or even thousands of years to transition fully from a lifestyle of subsisting on wild plants to keeping small gardens and later tending large crop fields. They estimate that as many as 8, people may have lived here at one time.

The houses were clustered so closely back-to-back that residents had to enter the homes through a hole in the roof. They buried their dead under the floors of their houses. The walls of the homes are covered with murals of men hunting, cattle and female goddesses. Some of the earliest evidence of farming comes from the archaeological site of Tell Abu Hureyra, a small village located along the Euphrates River in modern Syria.

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