- 222 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
About this book
Becoming Neolithic examines the revolutionary transformation of human life that was taking place around 12,000 years ago in parts of southwest Asia. Hunter-gatherer communities were building the first permanent settlements, creating public monuments and symbolic imagery, and beginning to cultivate crops and manage animals.
These communities changed the tempo of cultural, social, technological and economic innovation. Trevor Watkins sets the story of becoming Neolithic in the context of contemporary cultural evolutionary theory. There have been 70 years of international inter-disciplinary research in the field and in the laboratory. Stage by stage, he unfolds an up-to-date understanding of the archaeology, the environmental and climatic evidence and the research on the slow domestication of plants and animals. Turning to the latest theoretical work on cultural evolution and cultural niche construction, he shows why the transformation accomplished in the Neolithic began to accelerate the scale and tempo of human history. Everything that followed the Neolithic, up to our own times, has happened in a different way from the tens of thousands of years of human evolution that preceded it.
This well-documented account offers a useful synthesis for students of prehistoric archaeology and anyone with an interest in our prehistoric roots. This new narrative of the first rapid transformation in human evolution is also informative to those interested in cultural evolutionary theory.
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Half Title
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Table of Contents
- List of figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 A Concentration of Opportunity
- 2 Changing Subsistence Strategies: Foraging to Farming
- 3 Changing Subsistence Strategies: Hunting and Herding
- 4 Early Epipalaeolithic ā The Transformation Begins
- 5 Complex Hunter-Harvesters in the Levant and beyond
- 6 Early Pre-Pottery Neolithic ā Transforming Their World
- 7 Late Pre-Pottery Neolithic ā Climax
- 8 Further Transformation: Dispersal and Expansion
- 9 The Evolutionary Framework for the Story
- 10 The EpipalaeolithicāNeolithic Transformation: The Pivot of Cultural Evolution
- 11 The Problem of Neolithic Religion
- 12 The Triple A: Aggregation, Acceleration, Anthropocene
- Index