A Beginner's Guide to the Neolithic Period

Kansas wheat field

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The Neolithic period as a notion is based on an idea from the 19th century, when John Lubbock split Christian Thomsen's "Stone Age" into the Old Stone Age (Paleolithic) and New Stone Age (Neolithic). In 1865, Lubbock distinguished the Neolithic as when polished or ground stone tools were first used but since Lubbock's day, the definition of Neolithic is a "package" of characteristics: groundstone tools, rectangular buildings, pottery, people living in settled villages and, most importantly, the production of food by developing a working relationship with animals and plants called domestication.

Theories

In archaeological history, there have been many different theories about how and why agriculture was invented and then adopted by others: the Oasis Theory, the Hilly Flanks Theory, and the Marginal Area or Periphery Theory are only the most well-known.

In retrospect, it does seem odd that after two million years of hunting and gathering, people would suddenly start producing their own food. Some scholars even debate whether farming—a labor-intensive task which requires the active support of a community—was really a positive choice for hunter-gatherers. The remarkable changes that agriculture brought to people are what some scholars call the "Neolithic Revolution".

Most archaeologists today have abandoned the idea of one single overarching theory for the invention and cultural adoption of farming, because studies have shown that circumstances and processes varied from place to place. Some groups willingly embraced the stability of animal and plant tending while others fought to maintain their hunter-gatherer lifestyle for hundreds of years.

Where

The "Neolithic", if you define it as the independent invention of agriculture, can be identified in several different places. The main hubs of plant and animal domestication are considered to include the Fertile Crescent and the adjacent hilly flanks of the Taurus and Zagros mountains; the Yellow and Yangtze river valleys of northern China; and central America, including parts of northern South America. Plants and animals domesticated in these heartlands were adopted by other peoples in adjacent regions, traded across continents, or brought to those people by migrations.

However, there is increasing evidence that hunter-gatherer horticulture led to independent domestication of plants in other locations, such as Eastern North America.

The Earliest Farmers

The earliest domestications, animal and plant (that we know of), occurred some 12,000 years ago in southwest Asia and the Near East in the Fertile Crescent of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers and the lower slopes of the Zagros and Taurus mountains adjacent to the Fertile Crescent.

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Hirst, K. Kris. "A Beginner's Guide to the Neolithic Period." ThoughtCo, Aug. 25, 2020, thoughtco.com/neolithic-period-in-human-history-171869. Hirst, K. Kris. (2020, August 25). A Beginner's Guide to the Neolithic Period. Retrieved from https://www.thoughtco.com/neolithic-period-in-human-history-171869 Hirst, K. Kris. "A Beginner's Guide to the Neolithic Period." ThoughtCo. https://www.thoughtco.com/neolithic-period-in-human-history-171869 (accessed March 28, 2024).