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The term Neolithic Revolution was coined in 1923 AD by V. Gordon Childe to describe the first in a series of agricultural revolutions in Middle Eastern history. The period is described as a "revolution" to denote its importance, and the great significance and degree of change affecting the communities in which new agricultural practices were gradually adopted and refined. The beginning of this process in different regions has been dated from perhaps 8000 BC in the Kuk Early Agricultural Site of Melanesia[7][8] to 2500 BC in Subsaharan Africa, with some[who?] considering the developments of 9000–7000 BC in the Fertile Crescent to be the most important. This transition everywhere seems associated with a change from a largely nomadic hunter-gatherer way of life to a more settled, agrarian-based one, with the inception of the domestication of various plant and animal species—depending on the species locally available, and probably also influenced by local culture. There are several competing (but not mutually exclusive) theories as to the factors that drove populations to take up agriculture. The most prominent of these are: The Oasis Theory, originally proposed by Raphael Pumpelly in 1908, popularized by V. Gordon Childe in 1928 and summarised in Childe's book Man Makes Himself.[9] This theory maintains that as the climate got drier due to the Atlantic depressions shifting northward, communities contracted to oases where they were forced into close association with animals, which were then domesticated together with planting of seeds. However, today this theory has little support amongst archaeologists because subsequent climate data suggests that the region was getting wetter rather than drier.[10] The Hilly Flanks hypothesis, proposed by Robert Braidwood in 1948, suggests that agriculture began in the hilly flanks of the Taurus and Zagros mountains, where the climate was not drier as Childe had believed, and fertile land supported a variety of plants and animals amenable to domestication.[11] The Feasting model by Brian Hayden[12] suggests that agriculture was driven by ostentatious displays of power, such as giving feasts, to exert dominance. This required assembling large quantities of food, which drove agricultural technology. The Demographic theories proposed by Carl Sauer[13] and adapted by Lewis Binford[14] and Kent Flannery posit an increasingly sedentary population that expanded up to the carrying capacity of the local environment and required more food than could be gathered. Various social and economic factors helped drive the need for food. The evolutionary/intentionality theory, developed by David Rindos[15] and others, views agriculture as an evolutionary adaptation of plants and humans. Starting with domestication by protection of wild plants, it led to specialization of location and then full-fledged domestication. Peter Richerson, Robert Boyd, and Robert Bettinger[16] make a case for the development of agriculture coinciding with an increasingly stable climate at the beginning of the Holocene. Ronald Wright's book and Massey Lecture Series A Short History of Progress[17] popularized this hypothesis. The postulated Younger Dryas impact event, claimed to be in part responsible for megafauna extinction, and which ended the last ice age, could have provided circumstances that required the evolution of agricultural societies for humanity to survive. The agrarian revolution itself is a reflection of typical overpopulation by certain species following initial events during extinction eras; this overpopulation itself ultimately propagates the extinction event. Leonid Grinin argues that whatever plants were cultivated, the independent invention of agriculture always took place in special natural environments (e.g., South-East Asia). It is supposed that the cultivation of cereals started somewhere in the Near East: in the hills of Palestine or Egypt. So Grinin dates the beginning of the agricultural revolution within the interval 12,000 to 9,000 BP, though in some cases the first cultivated plants or domesticated animals' bones are even of a more ancient age of 14–15 thousand years ago.[18] Andrew Moore suggested that dawn of the neolithic revolution originated over long periods of development in the Levant, possibly beginning during the Epipaleolithic. In "A Reassessment of the Neolithic Revolution", Frank Hole further expanded the relationship between plant and animal domestication. He suggested the events could have occurred independently over different periods of time, in as yet unexplored locations. He noted that no transition site had been found documenting the shift from what he termed immediate and delayed return social systems. He noted that the full range of domesticated animals (goats, sheep, cattle and pigs) were not found until the sixth millennium at Tell Ramad. Hole concluded that "close attention should be paid in future investigations to the western margins of the Euphrates basin, perhaps as far south as the Arabian Peninsula, especially where wadis carrying Pleistocene rainfall runoff flowed."[19] Terror Management Theory postulates that in switching to agriculture, humans attempted to suppress their unconscious fear of death: controlling death by controlling nature. TM studies show that "wilderness inspire[s] more thoughts about death than either cultivated nature or urban environments" and that "death reminders reduce[] perceived beauty of wilderness".[20] From this perspective, agriculture functioned as a new modality of terror management, facilitated mainly by warmer climate and the quaternary extinction event, which caused a reduction in big-game hunting and the self-esteem, politics, and control over nature associated with it. TMT offers both an evolutionary and an anthropological explanation to explain non-nutritional motivations for the shift to agriculture: 1) Evolutionarily, hominids began using their emerging cognitive abilities to meet basic needs like nutrition, but this happened before they had reached the point where significant self (and thus end-of-self) awareness arose. Death awareness became a highly disruptive byproduct of prior adaptive functions. The resulting anxiety threatened to undermine these very functions and thus needed amelioration. Any social formation or practice that was to be widely accepted by the masses needed to provide a means of managing this terror. 2) The anthropological record shows that big game hunting by primitive peoples was comparatively unproductive and "motivated more by social and political factors than by the need to regularly and reliably provision a family or band with food" [21] The late pleistocene megafaunal extinctions, coupled with a possible increase in hunter-gatherer nutritional needs, led to greater plant and small-game reliance. A considerable amount of low-yield, psychologically-motivated big game hunting in the late pleistocene continued even when the nutritional needs of a growing population were better served totally abandoning it in favor of more small game and plant collection. [22][23] Abandoning or reducing big-game hunting left a social and self-esteem vacuum, coupled with a reduction in the ability to exert control over nature. This led to the search for psychological substitutes in a new mode of food acquisition that could also provide social and political standing and greater control over nature: agriculture. Indeed, the regions in the Old world which maintained most hunter-gatherer tribes were those least affected by the megafaunal extinctions: Tropical Asia and Subsaharan Africa. Whereas big-game hunting enhanced ego by reducing efficiency in food acquisition, agriculture did it by increasing it. However, it took many years at the beginning of the neolithic for the development of agriculture to provide more food than hunting-gathering, as it involved "two millennia or more" with "many stops and starts" of "slow...increase[s] [in] the proportion of [selected]…rare mutant...non-shattering cereal variants" which are considered "the backbone of any agricultural system".[24]Thus switching to agriculture A) had cultural motivations, not just nutritional, as the choice to devote time to the development of agriculture did not initially yield more food than the choice to devote that same time to hunting and gathering instead B) As the mastery of agricultural methods developed, the period of allegedly superior agriculturalist nutrition did not last long, and instead of returning to hunting-gathering while the earth's carrying capacity still allowed it, populations soon became willing to accept worse nutritional and health standards for the sake of cultural habituation, which is closely linked to terror management. For most of the neolithic, agriculturalists had more anaemias and vitamin deficiencies, more spinal deformations and more dental pathologies, while average height went down from 5'10" (178 cm) for men and 5'6" (168 cm) for women to 5'5" (165 cm) and 5'1" (155 cm), respectively, and it took until the twentieth century for average human height to come back to the pre-Neolithic Revolution levels.[25] [26] Ernest Becker argued that a shift from "spiritual" to physical control of nature, as well as primitive offerings of surplus food to the Gods could be tied to the origins of agriculture as well. [27] TM also argues that a "quiet ego quiets death anxiety" more securely than high self-esteem [28] Part of the way in which hunter-gatherers suppressed their death fear was through contextual humbleness—seeing themselves as part of the natural world instead of the more human-centric world of agriculture and civilization, which led to subsequent efforts to "make man count for more than any other animal" via the creation and maintenance of material culture.[29] In contrast to the Paleolithic (2.6 million years ago to 10,000 BC) in which several hominid species existed, only one (Homo sapiens) reached the Neolithic. |
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