The Changes Brought By The Neolithic Revolution
The Neolithic Revolution started 12,000 years ago, following the last Ice Age resulted in a great shift from food collection to food-producing. This created a food surplus that made the first civilizations possible. In the article “The Reign of the Farmer” McClellan and Dorn explain that following the Neolithic in the Near East, mixed economies that connected the technologies of horticulture and animal husbandry were beginning to form, that had social, cultural, technological and scientific changes. How we create a new economy based around horticulture and animal husbandry changed society drastically in a particular culture and social status.
The culture shifted from a work-oriented lifestyle to a more relaxed way of life. People no longer moved from regions, choosing to settle in communities. Disperse autonomous villages formed containing dozens of houses with several hundred inhabitants. The home became a centerfold of social interactions that forced the people to deal with novel issues about “public space, privacy, and hospitality.” Experimentation with drugs and fermentation soon followed. Fertility rates were increased from the inactive lifestyles - common then - that included a diet high in carbohydrates allowing women to bear and support for more children. Children offered an economic value, being able to care for animals and garden assistance.
Social stratification began as greater food surpluses leading to increased exchange caused wealthier settlements with “full-time potters, weavers, masons, toolmakers, priests, and chiefs.” (22) So-called “big men” societies appeared that were influenced by “kinship, rankings” and the ability to accumulate and distribute goods. Populations continued to boom with richer, convoluted social systems developing, regional crossroads and trading centers being created and real towns being formed. The food surplus required new technologies to store excess food to feed emerging civilizations. Paleolithic groups practiced basket weaving but the use of weaving did not flourish into a vast textile technology until the need for cloth and storage vessels. In addition to textiles, pottery was developed to create jars and vessels to stock and carry the excess products of farming. Eventually, centers formed dedicated to the large scale manufacturing of ceramics. The process of creating pottery, pyro technology laid the foundation for metallurgy in the Bronze and Iron ages. Neolithic communities began to build permanent structures with wood, mud-brick, and stone. They began to develop useful tools by applying an early form of metallurgy to naturally occurring raw copper.
With the creation of civilizations, the scientific practice could happen easily. In the modern-day, Stonehenge has been recognized as an astrological device. It is widely accepted that Stonehenge functioned as a major ceremonial center that worshiped the sun and the moon. This was useful in establishing a regional calendar. William Stukeley wrote about the solar alignment in 1740. The sun rises daily at an alternate point on the horizon, a point that moves back and forth with the horizon over a year. Every year at midsummer, the sun as seen from Stonehenge rises at its most northern point, which matches where the builders placed the Heel Stone. Regardless of disagreements about the claims of Stonehenge being an observatory and computer, it is agreed that there was large astronomical significance with regard to the following of cyclical movements of the sun and the moon. The shrine had been assembled to track the start and end of seasonal changes of heavenly bodies across the horizon as they rise and fall. It not only marked the sun’s ascent at the summer solstice the rise of the sun at the winter solstice as well as the fall and spring equinoxes. It also tracks the more complicated movements of the moon back and forth along the horizon. The construction of Stonehenge required regular observation of the sun and the moon over many decades and comprehension of horizon astronomy.
When the Neolithic Revolution began 12,000 after the Ice Age, there was a shift from food gathering to food-producing, making it possible for food to be in surplus. The excess of food led to the rise of communities, free from their nomadic lifestyles. This change, due in part to horticulture and animal husbandry had far-reaching, social, cultural, technological and scientific changes that shaped the future of humanity.
