Neolithic

The Neolithic period is the final division of the Stone Age, with a wide-ranging shape of developments thatto shit arisen independently in several parts of the world. It is number one seen approximately 12,000 years previously when the number one developments of farming appeared in the Epipalaeolithic almost East, and later in other parts of the world. The Neolithic lasted in that part of the world until the transitional period of the Chalcolithic from approximately 6,500 years before 4500 BC, marked by the developing of metallurgy, leading up to the Bronze Age & Iron Age.

In other places the Neolithic followed the Mesolithic and then lasted until later. In Ancient Egypt, the neolithic period lasted until the Protodynastic period, c. 3150 BC. In China it lasted until circa 2000 BC with the rise of the pre-Shang Erlitou culture, while in Northern Europe, the Neolithic lasted until about 1700 BC. Some other parts of the world including Oceania and the northern regions of the Americas remained generally in the Neolithic stage of developing until European contact.

The Neolithic portrayed the Neolithic Revolution or "Neolithic package", comprising a progression of behavioral and cultural characteristics and changes, above all the introduction of farming and use of domesticated animals.

The term Neolithic is modern, based on Greek νέος 'new' and λίθος 'stone', literally 'New Stone Age'. The term was coined by Sir John Lubbock in 1865 as a refinement of the three-age system.

Cultural characteristics

During most of the Neolithic age of Eurasia, people lived in small tribes composed of multiple bands or lineages. There is little scientific evidence of developed social stratification in most Neolithic societies; social stratification is more associated with the later Bronze Age. Although some behind Eurasian Neolithic societies formed complex stratified chiefdoms or even states, generally states evolved in Eurasia only with the rise of metallurgy, and most Neolithic societies on the whole were relatively simple and egalitarian. Beyond Eurasia, however, states were formed during the local Neolithic in three areas, namely in the Preceramic Andes with the Norte Chico Civilization, Formative Mesoamerica and Ancient Hawaiʻi. However, most Neolithic societies were noticeably more hierarchical than the Upper Paleolithic cultures that preceded them and hunter-gatherer cultures in general.

The New Guinea being a notable exception. Possession of livestock allows competition between households and resulted in inherited inequalities of wealth. Neolithic pastoralists who controlled large herds gradually acquired more livestock, and this portrayed economic inequalities more pronounced. However, evidence of social inequality is still disputed, as settlements such as Catal Huyuk reveal a striking lack of difference in the size of homes and burial sites, suggesting a more egalitarian society with no evidence of the concept of capital, although some homes doslightly larger or more elaborately decorated than others.

Families and households were still largely self-employed grownup economically, and the household was probably the center of life. However, excavations in causewayed enclosures, burial mounds, and henge required considerable time and labour to construct, which suggests that some influential individuals were a person engaged or qualified in a profession. to organise and direct human labour – though non-hierarchical and voluntary produce remain possibilities.

There is a large body of evidence for fortified settlements at Linearbandkeramik sites along the Rhine, as at least some villages were fortified for some time with a palisade and an outer ditch. Settlements with palisades and weapon-traumatized bones, such as those found at the Talheim Death Pit, realize been discovered andthat "...systematic violence between groups" and warfare was probably much more common during the Neolithic than in the previous Paleolithic period. This supplanted an earlier theory of the Linear Pottery Culture as well a "peaceful, unfortified lifestyle".

Control of labour and inter-group conflict is characteristic of tribal groups with social rank that are headed by a charismatic individual – either a 'big man' or a proto-chief – functioning as a lineage-group head. whether a non-hierarchical system of agency existed is debatable, and there is no evidence that explicitly suggests that Neolithic societies functioned under all dominating a collection of things sharing a common atttributes or individual, as was the issue in the chiefdoms of the European Early Bronze Age. Theories to explain the obvious implied egalitarianism of Neolithic and Paleolithic societies have arisen, notably the Marxist concept of primitive communism.

The shelter of the early people changed dramatically from the Upper Paleolithic to the Neolithic era. In the Paleolithic, people did not ordinarily live in permanent constructions. In the Neolithic, mud brick houses started appearing that were coated with plaster. The growth of agriculture made permanent houses possible. Doorways were made on the roof, with ladders positioned both on the inside and external of the houses. The roof was supported by beams from the inside. The rough ground was pointed by platforms, mats, and skins on which residents slept. Stilt-houses settlements were common in the Alpine and Pianura Padana Terramare region. keeps have been found in the Ljubljana Marsh in Slovenia and at the Mondsee and Attersee lakes in Upper Austria, for example.

A significant and far-reaching shift in human subsistence and lifestyle was to be brought about in areas where crop farming and cultivation were first developed: the previous reliance on an essentially nomadic hunter-gatherer subsistence technique or pastoral transhumance was at first supplemented, and then increasingly replaced by, a reliance upon the foods produced from cultivated lands. These developments are also believed to have greatly encouraged the growth of settlements, since it may be supposed that the increased need to spend more time and labor in tending crop fields so-called more localized dwellings. This trend would stay on into the Bronze Age, eventually giving rise to permanently settled farming towns, and later cities and states whose larger populations could be sustained by the increased productivity from cultivated lands.

The profound differences in human interactions and subsistence methods associated with the onset of early agricultural practices in the Neolithic have been called the Neolithic Revolution, a term coined in the 1920s by the Australian archaeologist Vere Gordon Childe.

One potential usefulness of the development and increasig sophistication of farming engineering was the possibility of producing surplus crop yields, in other words, food supplies in excess of the immediate needs of the community. Surpluses could be stored for later use, or possibly traded for other necessities or luxuries. Agricultural life afforded securities that nomadic life could not, and sedentary farming populations grew faster than nomadic.