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 from the egalitarian lifestyle of nomadic hunter-gatherers to one of agriculture, settlement, establishment of cross-group organisations, population growth and increasing social differentiation.
Archaeological data indicate that the food producing domestication of some types of wild animals and plants happened independently in separate locations worldwide, starting in Mesopotamia after the end of the last Ice Age, around 11,700 years ago. The climate became warmer, and vast areas were flooded due to the relatively sudden rise in sea levels, a catastrophe that meant the irreversible loss of their ancestral habitats for the survivors. This prehistoric event probably forms the real background to the globally widespread myths of a monumental flood — presumably also because it have led to a correspondingly large migration toward areas remaining above sea level. The result would be a rapid increase in the number of people to the point of overpopulation, followed by the typical consequences: conflicts over coveted territories; overuse of available resources; efforts to resolve or to compensate for these different issues via appropriately designed measures.
The transition to agriculture implies a severe restriction of high-quality food sources compared to what was previously available through hunting and foraging. Nevertheless, many researchers argue that the efficient production of calorie-rich crop allowed humans to invest their efforts in other activities, defining it as "ultimately necessary to the rise of modern civilization" with its global economic growth and industrialization. A minority of scientists takes a critical point of view. They consider that since the dawn of agriculture, a reciprocal relationship may have been initiated whereby more and more people need to be fed by ever larger areas of cultivated land and marine zones including associated infrastructure, and that this must be stabilized at a level that prevents the collapse of global ecosystems.
The social forms of human co-existence before and since the beginning of the Neolithic Revolution, the features of political organisations, agriculture, the sequence of their emergence, and empirical interrelations at various sites are the subject of current interdisciplinary research and debate. It is generally assumed that the brain evolution of Homo sapiens constitutes a crucial prerequisite for these cultural achievements, which, apart from that, did not all occur at exactly the same time, also varied depending on the factors of their respective environment, and the inventiveness of the groups involved. The complexity of this developments cannot be reduced to a strictly linear process; rather, the emergence of Neolithic cultures appears to be governed by the playful trial-and-error principle of Darwinian laws, in which the most economical solution finally prevails, assimilating or displacing all others.
Overview
The Neolithic Revolution encompassed much more than just the introduction of various food production techniques. Cultivating large areas of land and erecting monumental structures such as Göbekli Tepe required a level of labour that the small groups of nomadic hunter-gatherers who had hitherto dominated human prehistory could hardly have achieved on their own. Therefore, some modern scientists assume that the era discussed here was also accompanied by the establishment of cross-group organisations. The small communities, which had previously lived autonomously and often in competition with each other decided instead to cooperate, forming first alliances, some of which may have decided to settle down and build permanent villages close to their agricultural lands. In the following millennia, the most successful among them will have grown into city-states like Shuruppak mentioned in humanity's oldest written documents. These proverbially antediluvian societies radically altered their natural environment through animal breeding, deforestation, cultivation of certain crops and irrigation. Other developments that began to spread are pottery, polished stone tools, and the change from round to rectangular dwellings. In many regions, agriculture enabled the production of food surpluses, which in turn resulted in rapid population growth, a phenomenon known as the Neolithic demographic transition.These developments are sometimes called the Neolithic package. Including earliest political alliances – whose inner situation and massive influence on both the landscape of Eden and the later myths about mankind's creation within may be impressively described by the Atrahasis epic –, they form the backdrop to an increasing division of labour, leading to the emergence of centralised administrations and specialised crafts, in line with hierarchical ideologies, expanding trade and military operations, depersonalised systems of knowledge, aggregation of property and architecture in densely populated settlements, whose often monumental art primarily proclaim the power of the founders, depicting them as gods.
File:Göbeklitepe Şanlıurfa.jpg|thumb|Three of the artworks from Göbekli Tepe. Belonging to the youngest of the total around 40 monuments, they are located right at the top within an artificial hill. This so-called tell was erected over the course of at least 1,500 years layer by layer like a tower towards heaven, so the oldest of these representations form its fundament.|320x320px
Among the oldest known large-scale art in human history, erected between approximately 9,500 BP and at least 8,000 BP in northern Mesopotamia, are the numerous circular formations at Göbekli Tepe. Each of these monuments consists of a group of about eleven megalithic pillars, which, due to their distinctive features, are interpreted as symbolic male figures.
The earliest written records, dated to, originate from the Sumerian civilisation, which reached the Bronze Age and emerged also in the Fertile Crescent. Initially, the records exclusively documented quantities of foodstuffs to be delivered, often signed with impressions of cylinder seals. Over the millennia, this simple signs were developed into a complex cuneiform script, enabling poetic works that recount the frequent conflicts and appeasement attempts of the founding gods of this great civilisation.
At the beginning of their worldview, similar to Thales' later thesis of the Elements, stands a cosmic freshwater primordial ocean: the Abzu, whose mating with saltwater snake Tiamat first gave birth to Mother Earth Ninhursag, followed by several groups of younger deities. The most ingenious among them, Lord Wind Enlil, not only separated the heavenly waters from our female imagined planet by using his mind to blow a gigantic bubble of breathable air between both his witnesses, but also became the powerful leader of two further male parties. Confirmed by Mother Earth through the Tablets of Destinies and generally differentiated into the upper and the lower gods, additionally distributed to corresponding residences, they began a task-specialized cooperation that transformed the landscape along the great rivers into a fertile garden, complemented by the creation of first human couples in order to pacify a rebellion of the lower gods. This narrative, linked to a strict demarcation between gods and humans and the Flood as the gods' attempt to destroy their catastrophically multiplied creatures, thus originates from Sumer—Eden was merely their word for “steppe”.
The Neolithic idea of divine creativity, so to speak a kind of superhuman intelligence with its implicit “will to power”, was also adopted by many of the subsequent cultures, greatly influencing the thinking of their members with this distinctly hierarchical ideology. However, while the Sumerians attribute this gift—which shaped the universe and earth, humanity, and even the blueprint for Noah’s Ark—to a multitude of strongly anthropomorphic gods similar to those of the ancient Greeks, the authors of the biblical version chose to reduce the organised pantheon of their antediluvian ancestors to the singular God of monotheistic religion. With regard to the scientific-epistemological question of a First Cause of everything not without some interest, the reduction of the Sumerian gods’ biologically conceived diversity to a single, just as abstract as invisible yet omnipotent and infallible omniscience creator proved to be an obstacle to the palaeo-anthropological endeavour to reconstruct humanity’s prehistory, for this notion of "God" appears to be entirely cleansed of all empirical aspects. Modern translations of the Sumerian Genesis counter the resulting lack of understanding; the epic Athrahais itself takes place according to its incipit “When the gods were humans” – "had to work like them.”
Background
Prehistoric hunter-gatherers had different subsistence requirements and lifestyles from agriculturalists. They lived in relatively small groups that were mostly very mobile, built only temporary shelters, and had limited contact with foreign communities. The self-sufficient economy of such groups explains their mutual competition for available resources. Territorial conflicts, as sometimes documented by the actors themselves, were therefore not uncommon in human prehistory, but Aristotle already assumed that humans naturally possessed the ability to form political alliances. Their highly evolved reasoning allowed Neolithic hunter-gatherer groups to cooperate with foreign communities based on an understanding of the advantages of such measures – and this "much earlier than science had previously believed.".Agriculture is another achievement of our reason. While human intelligence here just deals with the handling of other species in order to use them as food or beasts of burden, the establishment of political organisations entails the challenging task of learning to collaborate with alien groups of one's own kind, which can become far more dangerous to each other than any other predator. Various species demonstrate the ability to engage in a form of agricultural domestication, but only humans are capable of concluding treaties to regulate the coexistence of participating groups. In the event of a breach of such contracts, deadly conflicts threaten to erupt, as the struggles of our closest relatives in the primate kingdom show in a frighteningly human way. Without our highly developed thinking skills—deeply connected with the ability to exchange and coordinate ideas by using articulated sounds between the members of a group—they have no choice but to follow their territorial urge to fight. When a group has grown too large splits into two parties and there is no space for one of them to migrate by conquering an own new territory, the aggressive energy intended for this purpose begins to discharge itself as ‘war’ between them and must continues until the weaker male party is completely wiped out. In analogous situations, humans are presented with an option that has not existed in evolution until now. Due to their heightened consciousness, the opposing groups can choose to establish treaties, agreeing to live in peace with their former enemies by adhering to the agreed-upon rules, and sharing the resources of a previously contested territory. In this regard, Aristotle's definition of Homo sapiens as zoon politikon remains justified to this day.
Agriculture and politics differ massively in terms of their content, which is why both may have been introduced independently of each other, even if they mostly merged in the course of further demographic and civilisational development. The labour required for the construction of desert kites as well as megalithic monuments of a certain size, according to cognitive‑archaeological calculations by K. Schmidt and C. Renfrew, points to political organisations founded by egalitarian communities of hunter‑gatherers. The transition to an agrarian economy is not mandatory. But it is plausible that a culture of nomadic herders may have begun with the idea of a hunting group feeding captured young animals with grass in order to secure themselves a living stock of herd members. Creating first small gardens, which, due to their nature, favour settlement over the nomadic herding, would be a parallel idea, likely initiated by other groups of hunter-gatherers. Both directions of agriculture seem to have clashed significantly over the available areas in Mesopotamia ; nevertheless, they reached a political agreement in the context of the later establishment of first city-states.
The need to plan and coordinate such communities' food production, manpower and resource allocation encouraged the division of labour, gradually leading to the emergence of specialised professions within increasingly complex societies. Migration, military conquests, diplomacy, and trade in surplus goods brought agrarian cultures into contact with outsiders, regardless of whether these were small foraging societies remaining self-sufficient, settled city-states, or organizations of ‘predatory’ nomadic horsemen. Cultures that were in some cases very strange encountered each other, separately developed traditions, languages and narratives about the world's creation became mixed. Knowledge was exchanged, and thinkers attempted to create uniform cosmogonies or metaphysical systems contributing to the rise of civilisations, philosophy and technological advancements.
Traditionally entrenched hierarchies between superior and inferior groups are difficult to assume among the egalitarian social associations of hunter-gatherers who founded first politically organisations like that of three male groups around Enlil Anu Enki living together with their seven divine wombs. However, it is evident that the increasingly specialized distinction between governing 'thinkers' and executing 'workers' over time could initiate an ever more power imbalance. This phenomenon of historically documented shifts in social relations is linked to the emergence and growth of initially simple cross-group organisations into modern nations. As such, politics can be distinguished from advancements in the domain of pure technology, including animal and plant breeding, metallurgy, and so forth.
According to current research, the first Neolithic Revolution began in Mesopotamia about 11.600 years ago. From there, it expanded via migration into immediately adjacent regions, displacing and/or assimilating the local hunter-gatherer cultures. This process, the so called Neolithisation, reached northern Europe around 5500 BCE. Cross-group organisations may have existed there even before the introduction of agriculture, a conclusion that various archaeologists have drawn from their calculations of the man-hours required to construct buildings such as the desert kites or Stonehenge. The initially very simple structure of this monument – a circular earthen rampart that encompassed an open burial site – was repeatedly reconsidered, altered, and expanded over a period of 2000 years and more. Ultimately this creative process culminated in a final version for which two fundamentally different types of stone were used to erect two times two formations that are identical in shape but arranged concentrically in tiers, whereby their menhirs also contrast in size, like the mythical giants and blue dwarfs.
An archaeological interpretation assumes that this differences could symbolize two populations that were strangers to each other until they met in the south of England, reaching an agreement to merge into a super-organisation after initial conflicts. From this perspective, Stonehenge represents a politically conceived work of art that depicts two ethnically distinct groups, now jointly managing the area and using their monument for two main purposes: as a site of assembly and as a means of intimidating rival tribes in the surrounding territories. The most impressive nucleus of this monument consists of two arch-shaped formations which, unlike the circles of pillars indicate a clear direction. The larger arch, numerically only half as strong but truly gigantic, encompasses that of the 'dwarfs', both equipped with two additional menhirs directly on the monument’s axis aiming at the sun on the morning of summer solstice, just as this heavenly God begins to emerge from behind the horizon.
This monument appears to have undergone no further constructive changes since 1400 BC; on the contrary, there are traces of deliberate destruction, as archaeology often records when foreign cultures overwhelms, assimilates, or displaces the previous ones. Apart from that, F. Niels believes that the slightly swelling shape of the mighty pillars could represent a prototype of the somewhat later pillars in early Greece, more precisely that of the Dorians, arriving there around 1200 BC. In any case, it is certain that the amazing culture of Stonehenge reached the Bronze Age around 3000 BC as evidenced by the nearby tin mine in Cornwall and the proven trade of its metal as far as the Aegean.
Centres of Neolithic Revolution have been archaeologically discovered in various locations worldwide; they occurred independently of one another and at different times, though always after the last ice age, within the more recent history of humanity. The last Neolithizations occurred in the past 300 years in connection with the discovery and subsequent colonization of Australia and the polar regions, still ongoing in the depths of the Amazon rainforest. Communities living there as Stone Age hunter-gatherers were and are wiped out or introduced to the achievements of the Iron Age, assimilating them within a few decades.