Agricultural Revolution
The Agricultural Revolution refers to the significant shift from hunting and gathering to farming and domestication of animals that occurred around 10,000 years ago. This transition led to the development of settled communities, the rise of complex societies, and the eventual emergence of civilizations. It marked a pivotal moment in human history, fundamentally altering the way people lived and interacted with their environment.
7 Key excerpts on "Agricultural Revolution"
eBook - ePubOn Human Nature
Biology, Psychology, Ethics, Politics, and Religion
- Michel Tibayrenc, Francisco J. Ayala, Michel Tibayrenc, Francisco J. Ayala(Authors)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Academic Press(Publisher)
...Discussion The global history of agricultural origins and the ensuing developments can be viewed in a similar way to the economic successes and failures of regional adaptations of products and techniques developed during the Industrial Revolution as analyzed by recent historians. The latter is the major technological and economic change that took place in England from c.1750/1780 AD through the 19th century, according to holders of the short chronology (eg, Mokyr, 2002). Its history, when compared to the previous 12 or 11 millennia, served as a socioeconomic model for G. Childe. Fully aware of the Stone Age subdivisions, he accepted the evidence collected by contemporary European archaeologists that the Neolithic period is when the components of farming societies such as pottery, axes-adzes, built houses, and more, first appeared. He named the transition to farming as the “Neolithic Revolution” (1929, 1952). His proposal followed the original idea of the American geologist R. Pumpelly whose investigations in central Asia prompted him to suggest that the Holocene drying of this area motivated humans in oases to start cultivation. This hypothesis was later named as the “oasis theory” that correlated a climatic change with the onset of agriculture. Childe followed A. Toynbee, a 19th century historian, and others in comparing the course of the historically recorded changes in Britain to prehistoric western Asia, often referred to as the Near East. While the study of the Industrial Revolution is based on a wealth of quantitative information concerning demographics, new machinery, labor movements, and more, it is not the same for the study of the prehistoric “revolution.” The emergence of agro-pastoral societies took a longer time to accomplish in the centers, and its interpretation depends on the archaeological reports that document the social and economic changes along with the development of religious and social domains...
eBook - ePub- Colin G. Scanes, Samia Toukhsati, Colin G. Scanes, Samia Toukhsati(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Academic Press(Publisher)
...Chapter 6 The Neolithic Revolution, Animal Domestication, and Early Forms of Animal Agriculture Colin G. Scanes University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, Milwaukee, WI, United States Summary Two events in human history have been accompanied by large increases in economic development as reflected by per capita income and population growth. These are the Neolithic Revolution (i.e., the transition from hunter–gatherer to agricultural societies, initially growing crops followed by domesticated livestock) and the Industrial Revolution (i.e., the era of mechanization of manufacturing). The Neolithic Revolution and the development of agriculture occurred independently in multiple geographical regions including the Middle East (the Fertile Crescent), East Asia (along the Ganges), South Asia (the Indus Valley), Mesoamerica, the Andes, and West Africa; these occurring at different prehistorical and historical times. The Neolithic Revolution first encompassed the domestication of cereals with domestication of animals occurring somewhat later. Corollaries to the Neolithic Revolution were the following: musculoskeletal stress, poorer overall nutrition accompanied by reduced height, the appearance of dental disease, and a huge increase in fertility. The explanation for why the Neolithic Revolution occurred is discussed. The founder crops of the Fertile Crescent were wheat, lentil, pea, chickpeas, bitter vetch, and flax. Among the other major crop domesticated were rice, millet, maize (corn), and potatoes. Crops were usually domesticated in a single location and ancestral wild species are still found. In contrast, there appears to have been one, two, or more domestications (e.g., one for each of sheep and goats and three for pigs and cattle) resulting in livestock animals domesticated independently in different locations...
eBook - ePub- Mark B. Tauger(Author)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Chapter 1 The origins of agriculture and the dual subordination The origins of agriculture are visible to us today only from archaeological digs and studies of foraging societies and groups that survived into the twentieth century. Western ideas about agricultural origins began when Europeans encountered “primitive” peoples, who were often foragers and knew little or nothing about farming. Other investigations found that humans and their societies and technologies had evolved over long evolutionary periods that came to be called Paleolithic and Neolithic, and that crop plants and domesticated animals of the world's agricultural systems had definite geographical and temporal origins. These findings led in the 1930s to the idea that early humans had developed agriculture in a “Neolithic Revolution” approximately 10,000 years ago, in response to a drying climate after the end of the last Ice Age. This shift to agriculture led to the development of cities and civilization some 5,000 years later. In this view, farming first developed in the “fertile crescent” of Mesopotamia, where the local flora and fauna included the wild progenitors of the main domesticated food crops and animals. New archaeological research has qualified this conception of the first “Agricultural Revolution.” Several scholars argued that the shift to farming was so rapid that it must have been preceded by “protoagriculture” for thousands of years before the Neolithic period. A cool and dry period about 11,000 years ago, the Younger Dryas, was followed by a warmer period favorable for the spread of plants and animals in the Near East. New research and rethinking of the evidence have shown that some of the presumed centers of agricultural development actually acquired the idea and techniques of farming from one or more of the smaller number of earlier centers...
eBook - ePub- Ivy Pinchbeck(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Chapter II The Agrarian Revolution DOI: 10.4324/9781315031828-4 the second half of the eighteenth century saw the speeding up of those economic changes destined to sweep away the rural organisation which had existed for centuries and to substitute the modern system of the large farm and the landless labourer. Before the revolution farming had been carried on mainly for subsistence, and although London and one or two other large towns had drawn their provisions from all parts of the country, yet in the main, each district supplied its own needs and the simple requirements of food, drink and clothing were provided at home. Economically this was no longer possible. The reorganisation of industry, accompanied by the concentration of people in the new towns and the increase in population, made it imperative that the food supply of the nation should be increased if the ever-growing demands of the new industrial centres were to be satisfied. Moreover, a rise in the price of com about the middle of the century was an additional incentive to farmers to grow more com and increase their production. New methods and cultures had already been introduced but so far little attention had been paid to agricultural writers who advocated them, partly because the good harvests which persisted throughout the first half of the century satisfied the demand, and the low price of com did not seem to justify the sinking of capital in improvements. From 1765 to the end of the Napoleonic Wars, however, there were few really good harvests, and in many places the land was becoming increasingly unproductive as a result of continued neglect and the defective methods employed. The high prices brought about by the increased demand for a diminishing supply of wheat were not only maintained throughout the latter half of the century, but were sent still higher by the war and Napoleon’s Continental System which hindered the importation necessary to support the increased population. 1 1 From 34 s. 11 d...
eBook - ePub- Tom Kemp(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Chapter Two Agrarian revolution and industrialization Before industrialization society was made up predominantly of people who obtained their living from tilling the soil and raising animals; that part specialized in other pursuits depended for its support upon the surplus extracted by one means or another from the direct producers. The period immediately preceding industrialization in Europe, the ‘pre-industrial’ period, saw important changes in the agrarian structure, in an uneven way, but suggesting that changes of a certain kind and in a certain direction were necessary pre-conditions for it. In a summary way it can be claimed that traditional agriculture, carried on mainly by the peasantry, producing for household use and local consumption, had to be superseded by a more commercialized agriculture, producing partly for the market, if favourable conditions for industrialization were to come into being. This process was not only uneven between regions but it was spread over a long period of time, including that in which industrialization was going on, and, in a sense, where the peasantry survives, has still not been wholly completed. For centuries before industrialization began there is a history of settled agricultural communities in most parts of Europe. Although in many places new land was still being brought into cultivation this was small in extent compared with the area on which a setded agrarian life had been going on for a thousand years or more. Many traits of European agriculture, resulting from an adaptation of man to prevailing conditions of the soil and the climate in the earliest times, had a pretty well continuous existence through this time. For instance, this was an area of dry farming which did not require extensive irrigation works and which was based on a combination of cereal cultivation with animal husbandry...
eBook - ePubThe Five-Million-Year Odyssey
The Human Journey from Ape to Agriculture
- Peter Bellwood(Author)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- Princeton University Press(Publisher)
...Agriculture with domesticated crops and animals developed there by 8500 BCE, with staple food species that included cattle domesticated from the Eurasian aurochs, sheep, goats, pigs, einkorn and emmer wheat (two different species), barley, lentils, peas, chickpeas, and broad beans. 1 Fruits such as figs, grapes, olives, and dates followed between 6500 and 3500 BCE. 2 It is perhaps no exaggeration to state that the societies that pulled this repertoire together had a longer-lasting impact on the population history of western Eurasia than Alexander the Great, the Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and the British Empire all rolled into one. This powerhouse of food energy evolved in a Mediterranean climate with winter rainfall and summer drought, meaning that the food plants had annual (as opposed to perennial) growth habits, with seed dormancy during the hot dry summer. In practical terms, ancient Fertile Crescent farmers harvested the grains of these plants in the spring, selected some to store through the summer, processed the rest as food, and then planted the stored grains when the rains returned in the autumn. The human population that grew out of this agricultural system was enormous and highly migratory. One could stretch world history to its limits and suggest that the outpouring of populations from Europe during the post-1492 CE Colonial Era was a replay of what happened during the Neolithic, between 6,000 and 9,000 years before, because it was based essentially on the same Fertile Crescent food species...
eBook - ePubThe Archaeology of Mesopotamia
Theories and Approaches
- Roger Matthews(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...There is a general acceptance today that the hunting-gathering lifestyle was not nasty, brutish and short, as used to be assumed, but rather fulfilling, wholesome and successful. To have lasted so long as the sole modus operandi of modern humans and their closest relatives, it can only be classed as hugely successful. Why, then, did the system change? We have looked at the various elements – climate, population, plants and animals – in turn, and it is time now to put them back together in order to consider an integrated approach to this most basic issue, as increasingly adopted by researchers in this arena. Clearly a major factor in the story of the Neolithic revolution was the adoption of sedentary modes of living prior to the development of agriculture. Groube has cogently argued that sedentism, whether permanent or not, was adopted by human communities as a strategy for increased female productivity in a ceaseless battle against expanding populations of dangerous bugs and their attendant diseases, particularly malaria, schistosomiasis, and hook-worm: ‘each new micropredator would add incrementally to the mother's burden and the pressure for a more sedentary way of life’ (Groube 1996: 124). In Groube's nightmare spiral of disease and doom, the adoption of increasingly sedentary modes of living itself leads to greater vulnerability of human communities to attack by the growing range of parasites expanding in the warmer air of the immediately post-Pleistocene centuries, in turn necessitating the intensification of modes of settlement and food production by those communities. Thus was set in train what Groube calls an ‘escalator of intensification’ carrying humans from simple hunting and gathering through sedentism to agriculture and on to the eventual rise of cities and states. Whatever the stimulus, the existence of pre-agricultural sedentism is well established (Belfer-Cohen and Bar-Yosef 2000)...
