World History: The Neolithic Age

A major change, described by the great prehistorian Gordon Childe as a "revolution", occurred around the 9th millennium BC with the adoption of agriculture. Although research has tended to concentrate on the Fertile Crescent area of the Middle East, archaeology in the Americas, East Asia and Southeast Asia indicates that agricultural systems using different crops and animals may well have developed at similarly early dates. As might be expected, agriculture was particularly important in areas which became the cradles of early civilisations, such as the Yellow River valley in China, the Nile in Egypt, and the Indus Valley. Some peoples, such as Aborigines of Australia and the Bushmen of southern Africa, did not use agriculture until relatively modern times. Recent findings of considerable quantities of grains in the Ohalo II paleolithic site in modern Israel seem to suggest that cereals had been intentionally sown (without the agriculture-associated additional caretaking activities like fertilization, land clearance, etc) since 21000BC (PNAS 101 p9551-9555). 

Agriculture led to several major changes. It allowed far larger population densities. It also created, and allowed for, the storage of food surpluses that could support people not directly involved in food production. The development of agriculture allowed the creation of the first cities. The development of cities has led to what has been called civilisation; first in the Sumerian civilisation of lower Mesopotamia (3500 BC), then in Egypt along the Nile (3000 BC) and Harappa in the Indus Valley (2500 BC). There is evidence of elaborate cities with high levels of social and economic complexity. However, these civilisations were so different from one another that they must almost certainly have been independent in origin. At this time developments such as writing, currency, and extensive trade were introduced.

The 2nd millennium BC saw the emergence of complex state societies in Crete, mainland Greece and central Turkey. In China, proto-urban societies may have developed by 2500 BC, but the first dynasty to be identified by archaeology is that of the Shang. In the Americas, civilisations such as the Maya, the Moche and Nazca emerged in Mesoamerica and Peru at the end of the 1st millennium BC.

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