Introduced in the 1920s CE by Gordon Childe, the term “Neolithic Revolution” gives the deceitful impression that the events that marked this epoch of our prehistory occurred in a short and concentrated period, as has more recently been the case, revolutions transforming a whole world in a few months.
Depending on the benchmark used, it took several hundred to several thousand years for these events to develop and spread. However, the term “revolution” is fully justified if one considers the fact that it profoundly transformed a lifestyle that had dominated for tens of thousands of years. That several hundred years were necessary for this revolution to find its realization shows the depth of the transformations that took place, and reveals the slowness with which these events occurred, due in part to the absence of contact and communication between the communities involved in its movement. Nevertheless, it will spread across the globe through the millennia, appearing in a few places “spontaneously” – the Levant, China, Mexico, Peru, New Guinea, the Sahel – though not at the same time [4], and from there being imported to the rest of the world.
First, this revolution sees human communities abandoning the primitive and seemingly inescapable economy of predation that ensured the survival of all species until then, to implement an economy of production. It revolves around two main innovations: the introduction of agriculture and of animal domestication. The innumerable consequences of these two discoveries will transform deeply and irreversibly human life. Essentially, it will allow them to control food production, and to create food surpluses that will make sedentarization possible. Sedentarization will in turn open the door to all sorts of structural developments, whether demographic, economic, political, social, technological, or cultural.
To summarize, we can say that the introduction of an economy of production and the creation of food surpluses have started a chain of events around two axes: sedentarization and demographic expansion, giving birth to the first hamlets that will become villages, and later, cities, kingdoms and empires; the apparition of castes of specialists, which will accelerate technological development and the rise of political structures.
More recently, historians have preferred the term “evolution” instead of “revolution” with its too brutal connotations. It does not, however, imply a process that has been inexorable, whose causes could neither be controlled, nor changed. When we speak of the introduction of agriculture and, therefore, of the domestication of plants, we do not talk about all the plants, or about just any plant. We talk about plants possessing the nutritional qualities that could provide humans with a balanced diet, and that allowed the production of a surplus. In addition, when we speak about animal domestication, it is not about domesticating the dog (toward 14,000) [5] or the cat (toward 6,000), which are animals that could never feed a large population. Still today, the essential part of our meat diet rests on the first mammals that were domesticated around 8,000: the sheep, the goat, and the pig. The cow will be added to our livestock a few millennia later, and the horse, the last of the big mammals, will be domesticated around 4,000.
Nevertheless, taking control of food production certainly represents the starting point of an incontestable evolution, in which demographic growth, work specialization, and the development of means of communication, of transport, and of commerce all find their origin. The following numbers bring this evolution into perspective: whereas all humans lived as hunters-gatherers before the Neolithic Revolution, only 0.002% of the world population lives this way today; ninety percent of all humans that have lived to this day were hunter-gatherers!
The next table gives an overview of the time frame during which the main events characterizing this revolution take place in the Middle East:
Although the introduction of agriculture and animal domestication are the most famous features of the Neolithic era, its lesser-known facets will help understand how the civilizing process developed itself.
A direct consequence of sedentarization was the birth of architecture. The initial architectural steps were taken by the Natufians [6], the first populations to have attempted to control their food production by storing wild cereals (wheat, barley) while constructing the first permanent habitations. Very curiously as we will see, nomadic people settling down will all apply the same architectural concepts in their first endeavor throughout the millennia.
Another aspect that sedentarization brought in its wake was to transform funerary traditions. Although burials existed during the Paleolithic, disposing of the dead will become an obligation for settled populations, the first villages having to learn to cope with their dead.
Finally, sedentarization made the accumulation of objects possible, increasing social differences between individuals.
However, despite of these changes, we will see that the traditions and beliefs of the Paleolithic still dominate the new period. Spirits represent one of the factors contributing to the stability between the two eras, their powers and functions remaining unaltered. Another factor of stability is the way tasks were distributed: women organized settled life and supplied the community with cereals, vegetables, nuts and fruit, while men, backed-up by the shaman, went on hunting. In fact, nothing allows us to think that sedentary life has transformed the vision of the world of these communities: on the contrary, despite the profound transformations, very little has changed during most of this period.
Nevertheless, the end of the Neolithic era will be marked by deteriorating climatic and environmental conditions that will bring this long period of stability to a close. Most of the sites – some occupied for thousands of years – will be abandoned, and many communities will have to return to a nomadic lifestyle.
Precipitating further the fall of the ancestral world, the discovery of men’s sexual function and the domestication of the bull, the last bastions of shamanic powers, will mark the end of the world of spirits.
Ultimately, an entirely new world will arise from the ashes of the preceding one with the advent of cities, kingdoms, and empires, and the birth of political and religious institutions that fund our Antiquity.