The Neolithic Revolution

[cartoon 6]

I was watching 'The Legend of Korra' recently and at one point(I won't get into details because of spoilers) it get's mentioned that the state of the world has been stable for 10,000 years. At that moment I wondered if they chose the number 10,000 because 10,000 years ago the first civilizations were founded. I wasn't sure whether or not it was actually 10,000 years ago so I looked it up. Since the border between civilized and uncivilized is kind of vague. I tried to look up the beginning of agriculture(the neolithic revolution). While I was searching I remembered an old history class in which I learned that there were three major areas were agriculture was discovered: The Middle-East, China and Middle-America. Then I thought to myself: Didn't all of these happen around the same time(Relatively)? Turns out it happened first in the Middle-East and after that both in China and the Americas around the same time. Then I wondered: Across the entirety of human history(and prehistory) this all happened in a (again relatively) short time. I could see how the one in China and The Middle-East could be linked but the on in the Americas struck me as kind of odd. But when I tried to find more information about it I only found when the neolithic revolution started in the Americas and which crops they grew or history of agriculture in post-Colombian America.

Now I've written this I realize I ended up in quite a tangent. Anyway, do any of you know more about why the agriculture was discovered around the globe in approximately the same time?

 

[Dirty Hipsters]

I don't think agriculture was "discovered" at the time so much as it was put into practice.

The reason people moved from hunter/gatherer societies to agricultural ones is that as populations started to grow it became increasingly difficult to feed the entire population through hunting, and a more stable food source was required. I'm sure the different societies had figured out how to grow food before then, but had never needed to do so because traveling with the animal migration and hunting was easy.

My guess was that in those 3 areas, the Middle East, China, and America populations grew too large to survive only on hunting and gathering, and therefore switched to agriculture, and this just coincidentally happened at around the same time.

 

[JoJo]

The rise of farming probably happened in several places at a similar time because the climate became more suited for farming in those areas as the last Ice Age was ending.

 

[Thaluikhain]

IIRC, there was a climatic shift some 13,000 years ago, and human society in many places had to change because of it.

That sort of thing happens every so often, some 3,000 or so years ago, I believe, there was another big climatic shift and civilisations all across the world relatively suddenly changed.

 

[Nickolai77]

Agriculture in the Americas's only took off around 5-6000 years ago I think, whereas in Eurasia it is around 8000 years old. Agricultural knowledge would have spread relatively quickly from the Middle East to Europe due to the close proximity of the two regions.

Bear in mind also that in these same sorts of timescales, two cultures separately developing agriculture in the same millennia isn't too surprising.

 

[Falseprophet]

I was watching 'The Legend of Korra' recently and at one point(I won't get into details because of spoilers) it get's mentioned that the state of the world has been stable for 10,000 years. At that moment I wondered if they chose the number 10,000 because 10,000 years ago the first civilizations were founded.

Another possibility: the number 10,000 is a metaphor in some East Asian cultures, e.g. China and Japan, for any really, really big number. The term "the 10,000 things" sometimes appears in Taoist philosophy, and other writings influenced by it, and it basically means "all things" or "everything in existence". And 10,000 years is a term that usually means "a really, really long time" [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_thousand_years].

 

[Blue_vision]

Yeah, as everyone else here has said, it's basically because that period came right after the end of the last ice age. Warmer temperatures means climates better suited for agriculture, means people actually have an incentive to use agriculture.

 

[Albino Boo]

Actually its not a short period time. The transition from hunter gathering to farmers happened slowly over 1000s of years. The evidence is best preserved in the middle east because of its dry climate so other areas might have been developing earlier but the evidence has been destroyed. There also the problem of dating, radiocarbon dating can be out as much as 400 years that far back, so to sites that have the same official date could be as far apart as 800 years.

 

[OneCatch]

I don't think agriculture was "discovered" at the time so much as it was put into practice.

The reason people moved from hunter/gatherer societies to agricultural ones is that as populations started to grow it became increasingly difficult to feed the entire population through hunting, and a more stable food source was required. I'm sure the different societies had figured out how to grow food before then, but had never needed to do so because traveling with the animal migration and hunting was easy.

My guess was that in those 3 areas, the Middle East, China, and America populations grew too large to survive only on hunting and gathering, and therefore switched to agriculture, and this just coincidentally happened at around the same time.

Tbf there is something of a chicken and egg argument as to whether the switch to agriculture was forced by a population increase, or if the relatively easy calories of agriculture in turn caused a population boom.
We know that agriculture and population boom occurred at roughly the same time, but we don't know which change caused the other.

OT, I agree with everyone else that the end of the last ice age certainly made agriculture far more productive and thus desirable. That probably accounts for the relatively rapid and simultaneous switch to agriculture globally.

 

[Flatfrog]

Not much to add except that if you're interested in this kind of thing, you can't do much better than to read Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond. It's all about the question of whether societies developed the way they did by accident or whether it was inevitable. In particular, he has a neat theory that agriculture flourished in the Middle East and Eurasia because the east-west orientation of the landmass allowed agricultural innovations to spread more easily than in a north-south axis like the Americas, where climate differences are more of a barrier.

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

I was watching 'The Legend of Korra' recently and at one point(I won't get into details because of spoilers) it get's mentioned that the state of the world has been stable for 10,000 years. At that moment I wondered if they chose the number 10,000 because 10,000 years ago the first civilizations were founded.

Another possibility: the number 10,000 is a metaphor in some East Asian cultures, e.g. China and Japan, for any really, really big number. The term "the 10,000 things" sometimes appears in Taoist philosophy, and other writings influenced by it, and it basically means "all things" or "everything in existence". And 10,000 years is a term that usually means "a really, really long time" [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_thousand_years].

That's interesting. It actually ties into a word modern English borrowed from Ancient Greek -- myriad. A myriad is literally 10,000 in Ancient Greek, but figuratively it meant a huge number, as it does in modern English and, apparently, as the same number is used in some Asian cultures.

As far as the neolithic revolution, other people have already said about what I know about it. A combination of changing climates and rising populations would have made it necessary. Nobody would choose agriculture, a lifestyle of backbreaking labor, over hunting and gathering, a lifestyle in which people only work something like 10 or 20 hours a week when times are good, without something that causes the extra work involved in agriculture to be either necessary or no longer actually be more than is involved in hunting and gathering, as might happen if game is scarce.

 

[Albino Boo]

That's interesting. It actually ties into a word modern English borrowed from Ancient Greek -- myriad. A myriad is literally 10,000 in Ancient Greek, but figuratively it meant a huge number, as it does in modern English and, apparently, as the same number is used in some Asian cultures.

As far as the neolithic revolution, other people have already said about what I know about it. A combination of changing climates and rising populations would have made it necessary. Nobody would choose agriculture, a lifestyle of backbreaking labor, over hunting and gathering, a lifestyle in which people only work something like 10 or 20 hours a week when times are good, without something that causes the extra work involved in agriculture to be either necessary or no longer actually be more than is involved in hunting and gathering, as might happen if game is scarce.

The word thing is rather easy, because the English Greek and Sanskrit are all indo european languages and some point in the really distance past there was a common ancestor.


Early agriculture did not require hours of backbreaking work, at least in the middle east. You could harvest enough of one the early varieties of wheat, Emmer, to feed a family of 4 in three days by just sowing the seed in good level ground. It was less work than being a hunter gather. This method of just sowing, according to experimental archaeologist, produced between 10 and 100 times more food per acre than hunter gathering. The problem comes because of the good food supply the population took off and the yields per acre were no longer sufficient to feed the number of people alive. This forced less productive land into use and the search for better methods of farming. This could be one of the reasons why the early civilizations, China, Egypt and Mesopotamia formed along large rivers. The alluvial soil deposited by the annual floods stopped the soil becoming exhausted and allowed larger population growth which in turn allowed more specialisation and manpower for irrigation. All leading to cycle of higher yields per acre and 5000 years after the Neolithic revolution the city of UR had a population of around 50000. Compare this to the estimated global population, pre the revolution, of 10 million.

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

That's interesting. It actually ties into a word modern English borrowed from Ancient Greek -- myriad. A myriad is literally 10,000 in Ancient Greek, but figuratively it meant a huge number, as it does in modern English and, apparently, as the same number is used in some Asian cultures.

As far as the neolithic revolution, other people have already said about what I know about it. A combination of changing climates and rising populations would have made it necessary. Nobody would choose agriculture, a lifestyle of backbreaking labor, over hunting and gathering, a lifestyle in which people only work something like 10 or 20 hours a week when times are good, without something that causes the extra work involved in agriculture to be either necessary or no longer actually be more than is involved in hunting and gathering, as might happen if game is scarce.

The word thing is rather easy, because the English Greek and Sanskrit are all indo european languages and some point in the really distance past there was a common ancestor.


Early agriculture did not require hours of backbreaking work, at least in the middle east. You could harvest enough of one the early varieties of wheat, Emmer, to feed a family of 4 in three days by just sowing the seed in good level ground. It was less work than being a hunter gather. This method of just sowing, according to experimental archaeologist, produced between 10 and 100 times more food per acre than hunter gathering. The problem comes because of the good food supply the population took off and the yields per acre were no longer sufficient to feed the number of people alive. This forced less productive land into use and the search for better methods of farming. This could be one of the reasons why the early civilizations, China, Egypt and Mesopotamia formed along large rivers. The alluvial soil deposited by the annual floods stopped the soil becoming exhausted and allowed larger population growth which in turn allowed more specialisation and manpower for irrigation. All leading to cycle of higher yields per acre and 5000 years after the Neolithic revolution the city of UR had a population of around 50000. Compare this to the estimated global population, pre the revolution, of 10 million.

It produced more food, but it was also more work. The harvest may have been easy compared to harvests later in history but that's what you do at the very end of season. There's the planting, there's weeding, plus taking care of any livestock (which may not have been an issue in the very early days, but certainly were by the time of Ur), which is labor intensive in itself. Hunter gatherers only really had to worry about the harvest/slaughtering, plus spending a little time finding something to kill or harvest. It produced less food, but it produced enough for the needs of the period, and took less work to do it. It's not like hunter gatherers were stupid.

Edit: As for the word thing, I'm not sure if that's the right comparison to draw, since we're talking about a similarity between a word from Ancient Greek (which was an Indo-European language) and an idiom in Chinese and Japanese (which aren't). It's not totally out there, since if the explanation goes all the way back to the indo- part of Indo-European, then China and Japan have both had plenty contact with the parts of Asia that speak Indo-European languages over the millennia, so it could easily be something borrowed from India, Iran, or another place where such a language was spoken, but it's a bit more complicated than a shared root language. "It's a coincidence" would be a better explanation than that. I't just that I've never heard of a figurative use coming down that far through a language group before, it's more like people have noticed that the word for "two" sounds kinda sorta similar in languages that you wouldn't think were related at first.