Neolithic Revolution

The Neolithic Revolution was the first agricultural revolution. It was the wide-scale transition of many human cultures from a lifestyle of hunting and gathering to one of agriculture and settlement which supported an increasingly large population.

Approximate centres of origin of agriculture (various forms of plants and animal domestication) and its spread in prehistory:


Fertile Crescent, approx 11.000 years ago (9.000 BC),
Yangtze and Yellow River basins, approx 9.000 years ago (7.000 BC)
New Guinea Highlands, approx 9.000-6.000 years ago (7.000-4.000 BC)
Central Mexico, approx 5.000-4.000 years ago (3.000-2.000 BC),
Northern South America, approx 5.000-4.000 years ago (3.000-2.000 BC),
Sub-Saharan Africa (exact location unknown), approx 5.000-4.000 years ago (3.000-2.000 BC),
Eastern USA, approx 4.000-3.000 years ago (2.000-1.000 BC)

The Neolithic Revolution involved far more than the adoption of a limited set of food-producing techniques. During the next millennia it would transform the small and mobile groups of hunter-gatherers that had hitherto dominated human history into sedentary societies based in built-up villages and towns, which radically modified their natural environment by means of specialized food-crop cultivation (e.g. irrigation and food storage technologies) that allowed extensive surplus food production. These developments provided the basis for high population density settlements, specialized and complex labor diversification, trading economies, the development of non-portable art, architecture, and culture, centralized administrations and political structures, hierarchical ideologies, and depersonalized systems of knowledge (e.g., property regimes and writing). The first full-blown manifestation of the entire Neolithic complex is seen in the Middle Eastern Sumerian cities (ca. 3,500 BC), whose emergence also inaugurates the end of the prehistoric Neolithic period.

(Source: Wikipedia)