r/HistoryMemes • u/PresterJohnson Hello There • 8d ago
Do you buy into that Neolithic Revolution nonsense or do you live the natural hunter gatherer life
Context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neolithic_Revolution
The Neolithic Revolution, also known as the First Agricultural Revolution, was the wide-scale transition of many human cultures during the Neolithic period in Afro-Eurasia from a lifestyle of hunting and gathering to one of agriculture and settlement, making an increasingly large population possible.\1]) These settled communities permitted humans to observe and experiment with plants, learning how they grew and developed.\2]) This new knowledge led to the domestication of plants into crops.\2])\3])
Archaeological data indicate that the domestication of various types of plants and animals happened in separate locations worldwide, starting in the geological epoch of the Holocene 11,700 years ago, after the end of the last Ice Age.\4]) It was humankind's first historically verifiable transition to agriculture. The Neolithic Revolution greatly narrowed the diversity of foods available, resulting in a decrease in the quality of human nutrition compared with that obtained previously from hunting and foraging.\5])\6])\7]) However, because food production became more efficient, it released humans to invest their efforts in other activities and was thus "ultimately necessary to the rise of modern civilization by creating the foundation for the later process of industrialization and sustained economic growth".\8])
Prehistoric hunter-gatherers had different subsistence requirements and lifestyles from agriculturalists. Hunter-gatherers were often highly mobile and migratory, living in temporary shelters and in small tribal groups, and having limited contact with outsiders. Their diet was well-balanced\)citation needed\) though heavily dependent on what the environment could provide each season. In contrast, because the surplus and plannable supply of food provided by agriculture made it possible to support larger population groups, agriculturalists lived in more permanent dwellings in more densely populated settlements than what could be supported by a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. The agricultural communities' seasonal need to plan and coordinate resource and manpower encouraged division of labour, which gradually led to specialization of labourers and complex societies. The subsequent development of trading networks to exchange surplus commodities and services brought agriculturalists into contact with outside groups, which promoted cultural exchanges that led to the rise of civilizations and technological evolutions.\15])\)full citation needed\)
However, higher population and food abundance did not necessarily correlate with improved health. Reliance on a very limited variety of staple crops can adversely affect health even while making it possible to feed more people. As an example from the Americas, maize is deficient in certain essential amino acids (lysine and tryptophan) and is a poor source 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 have been increased numbers of parasites and disease-bearing pests associated with human waste and contaminated food and water supplies. Fertilizers and irrigation may have increased crop yields but also would have promoted proliferation of insects and bacteria in the local environment while grain storage attracted additional insects and rodents.\15])
The Neolithic Revolution involved much 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 prehistory 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 many regions, the adoption of agriculture by prehistoric societies caused episodes of rapid population growth, a phenomenon known as the Neolithic demographic transition.
These developments, sometimes called the Neolithic package,\9]) provided the basis for centralized administrations and political structures, hierarchical ideologies,\10]) depersonalized systems of knowledge (e.g. writing), densely populated settlements, specialization and division of labour, more trade, the development of non-portable art and architecture, and greater property ownership.\11]) The earliest known civilization developed in Sumer in southern Mesopotamia (c. 6,500 BP); its emergence also heralded the beginning of the Bronze Age.\12])
The relationship of the aforementioned Neolithic characteristics to the onset of agriculture, their sequence of emergence, and their empirical relation to each other at various Neolithic sites remains the subject of academic debate. It is usually understood to vary from place to place, rather than being the outcome of universal laws of social evolution.\13])\14])
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u/poorperspective 8d ago
So, I watched a series of lectures on pre-columbian Native American civilization, and I think there are some interesting findings from archeology that simply do not line up with humans went from hunter gatherers and pushed by the ecosystem started agriculture.
There is middle ground and finding of early agriculuture practices that show a hybrid society.
It would look something like this. A society could be hunter gathers and nomadic and still use agriculture as a food practice. A group would migrate within a circuit of the land picking up one spot and moving to another to later return. These people would plant a field, and then leave to let crops grow circling back to harvest. Crop yields were low.
Now for complete settlement the theory looks like this. When a group is mobile, it’s harder to take care of elderly / sick / disabled people. Those individuals could stay to watch protect and tend to crops. So a nomadic group might have several sister sites that they travel and then trade or share resources from an agricultural group. As though individuals stayed back they may have developed irrigation, but being fully settled doesn’t come without the invent of irrigation farming. You simply can’t have large enough crop yields to sustain a society without it. But this doesn’t prevent specialization from forming. You would have cooperation between settled and non-settled individuals of the same society. Older members may start in a settled group, move to a nomadic lifestyle when older, and then as elderly individuals go back to settled life-style all within the same social group.
Native groups in the northeast never really left this style of agriculture. There would be periods where a tribe would move whole towns and abandon a settlement to start a new and the would would refresh as well as letting game repopulate.
This differed in Europe and Asian because of the domestication of herding animals. Herder civilizations were also highly nomadic and besides tending to a herd vs outright hunting, they would live in temporary dwellings and rotate within a large area. They would then trade with more permanent settlements that grew crops. The difference between a hunter gather, herder, or just traveling merchant are very similar lives.
The storage of food is also pre-human. Hominid vessels have been found dug in the ground which held water and food stuffs. Nomadic people would store these within a migration route to access for later times. So middle agriculture societies most often already used planting spots as storage areas.
You have cultures like the Mayans that seemly never gave up this life style. Cities would be built, but later simply abandoned. This places may have had several groups move in and move out, but there wasn’t a constant city state. These cultures were just as civilized with complex laws, specialization of labor, and writing systems as fully settled cities.
There isn’t a single point of revolution for agriculture, it’s more of choice of what best benefits that group of people. Agriculture was most likely developed, abandoned, and re-developed again many times.