Aliens had nothing to do with it. Honestly.
The Neolithic or New Stone Age is synonymous with a wide range of significant changes, not least of which was the refinement of stone tools for which the period was named. Larger human settlements, beer, and pottery also arose during this time. As did the human penchant for creating stone monoliths. But perhaps the single biggest innovation of the Neolithic was the advent of agriculture.
As we shall see, when that lightbulb moment struck in disparate areas all over the globe, things would never be the same.
Farming: The Biggest Idea Ever?
The emergence of agriculture is often seen as the defining event of the ‘Neolithic Revolution,’ and like all revolutions, its effect was… well… revolutionary. In fact, archaeologist Steven Mithen claims that the advent of farming was “the defining event of human history.”
Neolithic farming scene. (Archaeology Wiki).
Nominating the humble science of farming as the most significant human idea ever might seem like a stretch, but Mithen’s idea is persuasive. There are many lightbulb moments that we’ll investigate in this (and subsequent) discussions, relating to human speech, religion, writing, education, mathematics, the Industrial Revolution, and the internet, just to mention a few. But it’s arguable that none of these would’ve seen the light of day without the invention of agriculture. There’s a strong argument that without it, humans would still be living in small tribal groups and most of our accomplishments would never have occurred.
Of course, it’s highly unlikely that a Neolithic ‘Archimedes’ ran out of his cave screaming: “Eureka! I’ve invented an entirely new lifestyle that will change the world!” Far more likely, foraging groups gradually began to domesticate animals and plant seeds as a supplement to their hunter-gathering way of life.
Given that this shift from foraging to farming took place over generations, the change happened so organically it probably wasn’t noticed. Humans transitioned to farming at the same time in many unrelated locations, including the Levant, India, China, and Mesopotamia. In that respect, this lightbulb moment was closer to a searchlight moment.
Eventually, farming changed everything. Small, nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes put down roots and set up villages. Villages became towns. The towns eventually grew into cities. In the long term, agriculture freed some people from the task of providing food so they could undertake other roles: artists, priests, philosophers, and even primitive scientists. In this way, the agrarian lifestyle paved the way for advances in all domains of lightbulb moments.
So, even if our hypothetical caveman Archimedes had burst triumphantly out of his cave proclaiming a change in lifestyle, would this lightbulb moment have been welcomed? Unlikely. You see, for such a transformative idea, this lightbulb burned exceedingly dim for hundreds of years, and often mustn’t have seemed like a great idea at all. There were some teething problems (if one can count malnutrition and starvation as ‘teething problems’) as humans learned the vagaries of farming.
The much-vaunted ‘paleo’ diet of the forager was gone, replaced by a reliance on a limited range of crops that didn’t provide an appropriate range of nutrition. In these circumstances, a crop failure was disastrous, as there was no fallback position. Also, as humans began to live in closer proximity to each other, infectious diseases took their toll, jumping from person to person, or even jumping species from the newly domesticated animals.
So far, so bad. And it gets worse. Infant mortality went up. Life expectancy went down. Jared Diamond cites evidence that dramatically shows the effect of this transition: skeletal remains from this time show that after the adoption of farming, average height slumped from 175 cm to 160 cm for men, and 165 cm to 152 cm for women.
As time went by, humans became more proficient at agriculture, the human population began to increase, and our relationship to the natural environment became more distant. The advent of agricultural practices such as slash and burn methods of land clearing and the overgrazing of cattle had negative environmental impacts. In fact, the genesis of many of our current problems with our relationship with the planet begins at this point.
Adopting agriculture also brought on class divisions and gender inequality. It’s conjectured that women became less like the valued partners anthropologists theorize they were in the Paleolithic, and more like the chattel of Neolithic men. Slavery, too, appears to be an invention of agrarian societies. Clearly, humanity’s quality of life had changed, but not (in the short term) for the better. Things looked bleak. If ever there was evidence that human history was not a perpetual series of improvements, this was it.
Recreation of Neolithic settlement from 8,000 BC, in A??kl? Höyük, Turkey. (Sarah Murray/CC BY-SA 2.0).
Thank God I’m a Country Boy: The Agrarian Lifestyle
Given the significant downsides, why was farming so transformative for human society? To understand that, we need to look at the growing pressures on hunter-gatherer groups.
Anatomically modern humans had been around for hundreds of thousands of years. They had made little technological progress other than improving their stone tools, but they had little need of technology because the foraging lifestyle had been so good to them.
In 1966, American anthropologist Marshall Sahlins coined the term ‘affluent hunter-gatherers’ to describe these people. According to Sahlins’ research, these affluent hunter-gatherers had loads of leisure time and limited wants and needs. It’s possible that inhabitants of such foraging communities only needed to work somewhere between fifteen to twenty hours a week to keep themselves fed. Nice work if you can get it.
However, one can imagine that such a chilled-out lifestyle might not be optimal for driving technological advancement. In such an environment, ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ would probably be an adaptive way of thinking. Yet, eventually, change came in the Neolithic age.
Top image: Aerial photo of the ancient Neolithic city of Jericho, adjacent to modern farms.
Source: fullo88/Public Domain.
