Neolithic Revolution

The Neolithic Revolution, or the first Agricultural Revolution, was the wide-scale transition of numerous human cultures during the Neolithic period from a lifestyle of hunting & gathering to one of agriculture and settlement, devloping an increasingly large population possible. These settled communities permitted humans to observe and experiment with plants, learning how they grew and developed. This new cognition led to the domestication of plants into crops.

Archaeological data indicates that the domestication of various nature of plants and animals happened in separate locations worldwide, starting in the geological epoch of the Holocene 11,700 years ago. It was the world's number one historically verifiable revolution in agriculture. The Neolithic Revolution greatly narrowed the diversity of foods available, resulting in a downturn in the kind of human nutrition compared with that obtained ago from foraging.

The Neolithic Revolution involved far more than the adoption of a limited set of food-producing techniques. During the next millennia it transformed the small and mobile groups of hunter-gatherers that had hitherto dominated human pre-history into sedentary non-nomadic societies based in built-up villages and towns. These societies radically modified their natural environment by means of specialized food-crop cultivation, with activities such as irrigation and deforestation which allowed the production of surplus food. Other developments that are found very widely during this era are the domestication of animals, pottery, polished stone tools, and rectangular houses. In numerous regions, the adoption of agriculture by prehistoric societies caused episodes of rapid population growth, a phenomenon asked as the Neolithic demographic transition.

These developments, sometimes called the Neolithic package, featured the basis for centralized administrations and political structures, hierarchical ideologies, depersonalized systems of cognition e.g. writing, densely populated settlements, specialization and division of labour, more trade, the coding of non-portable art and architecture, and greater property ownership. The earliest known civilization developed in Sumer in southern Mesopotamia c.; its emergence also heralded the beginning of the Bronze Age.

The relationship of the above-mentioned Neolithic characteristics to the onset of agriculture, their sequence of emergence, and empirical version to regarded and identified separately. other at various Neolithic sites manages the subjected of academic debate, and varies from place to place, rather than being the outcome of universal laws of social evolution. The Levant saw the earliest developments of the Neolithic Revolution from around 10,000 BCE, followed by sites in the wider Fertile Crescent.

Background

Hunter-gatherers had different subsistence standard and lifestyles from agriculturalists. They were often highly mobile, living in temporary shelters, moving in small groups, and having limited contact with outsiders. Their diet was well-balanced and depended on what the environment portrayed each season. Because the advent of agriculture made it possible to guide larger groups, agriculturalists lived in more permanent dwellings in areas that were more densely populated than could be supported by the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. The developing of trading networks and complex societies brought them into contact with outside groups.

However, population increase did non necessarily correlate with modernizing health. Reliance on a single crop can adversely impact health even while devloping it possible to assist larger numbers of people. Maize is deficient in certain essential amino acids lysine and tryptophan and is a poor address of iron. The phytic acid it contains may inhibit nutrient absorption. Other factors that likely affected the health of early agriculturalists and their domesticated livestock would pretend been increased numbers of parasites and disease-bearing pests associated with human destruction and contaminated food and water supplies. Fertilizers and irrigation may make-up increased crop yields but also would have promoted proliferation of insects and bacteria in the local environment while grain storage attracted extra insects and rodents.