Neolithic Revolution: How Farming Began in the Fertile Crescent

The Neolithic Revolution was the transition from hunting and gathering to farming and herding, and one of its earliest and best-documented centres was the Fertile Crescent of the Near East. Between roughly 10,000 and 8000 BC, communities in the Levant, south-eastern Turkey, northern Mesopotamia and the Zagros Mountains domesticated wheat, barley, legumes, sheep, goats, cattle and pigs. The change made villages, towns and eventually cities possible, and it reshaped human populations, health, societies and landscapes for good.

A revolution named by Gordon Childe

The term “Neolithic Revolution” was popularised by the archaeologist V. Gordon Childe in the 1930s, especially in his book Man Makes Himself (1936). Childe compared the coming of farming to the Industrial Revolution: a turning point after which human life was fundamentally different. “Neolithic”, meaning “New Stone Age”, originally referred to polished stone tools, but the word came to stand for the farming way of life.

Childe also proposed one of the first explanations, the “oasis theory”. He suggested that as the climate dried after the Ice Age, people, plants and animals crowded together around rivers and oases, where they developed new relationships. Later research showed that the climatic history was more complicated, but Childe’s broad framing endured.

Today archaeologists stress that the “revolution” was really a long process. Domestication unfolded over thousands of years and in several places within the Fertile Crescent at once.

The setting: the Fertile Crescent

The Fertile Crescent is an arc of land running from the southern Levant north through Syria and south-eastern Turkey, then east and south along the foothills of the Zagros Mountains in Iraq and Iran. The name was coined by the American Egyptologist James Henry Breasted in the early 20th century.

The region had several advantages. Its Mediterranean-type climate, with mild wet winters and hot dry summers, favoured annual plants with large seeds that could survive the dry season. The wild ancestors of wheat, barley, lentils and peas grew there, as did wild sheep, goats, aurochs and boar. Within a short distance, people could find hills, plains, rivers and steppe.

The people of the region were also already prepared. The Natufian culture, from about 12,500 BC, had built permanent villages and harvested wild cereals intensively with flint sickles and grinding stones.

How the transition unfolded

Archaeologists divide the early Neolithic of the Near East into phases named after the absence of pottery. Exact dates differ between regions and studies, but the main outline is broadly agreed.

During the PPNA, people at sites such as Jericho, Netiv Hagdud, Jerf el Ahmar and Tell Aswad cultivated cereals that were still wild in form. Large storage buildings at Jerf el Ahmar and Dhra’ suggest that plant food was being managed and stored on a new scale. In south-eastern Turkey, communities raised monumental enclosures at Göbekli Tepe and related sites.

During the PPNB, domesticated einkorn, emmer and barley became dominant, and herds of domesticated animals appear. Villages grew much larger: sites such as Ain Ghazal in Jordan and Abu Hureyra in Syria may have housed a thousand people or more. By around 7000 BC, settlements like Çatalhöyük in central Anatolia held several thousand.

Founder crops and first herds

Eight plants are often called the “founder crops” of Near Eastern agriculture: emmer wheat, einkorn wheat, barley, lentil, pea, chickpea, bitter vetch and flax. The concept was developed by the botanist Daniel Zohary. Figs may have been tended even earlier: carbonised figs from Gilgal in the Jordan Valley, about 11,400 years old, were proposed in 2006 as an early cultivated variety, although this interpretation is debated.

The key sign of plant domestication is a change in the seed head. Wild cereals shatter when ripe, scattering their seeds; domesticated ones keep them, so that farmers can harvest them. This trait spread slowly, which shows that the process took one to three thousand years.

Animal domestication followed a similar pattern. Goats were domesticated in the Zagros Mountains, with evidence from Ganj Dareh in Iran around 8000 BC. Sheep, cattle and pigs were domesticated in south-eastern Anatolia and northern Syria between about 8500 and 8000 BC. The story is told more fully in Domestication of Sheep and Goats in the Neolithic Near East.

Life in the first farming villages

Daily life changed as farming took hold. In the PPNB, round huts gave way to rectangular houses with several rooms, plastered floors and sometimes upper storeys. Rectangular plans were easier to extend as households grew and stored more food.

Work became more repetitive and more tied to the seasons. Fields had to be cleared, sown, weeded, guarded and harvested, and grain had to be threshed, stored and ground by hand on stone querns. Livestock needed herding, protection and fodder.

Ritual life was also rich. At Jericho, Ain Ghazal and other sites, people removed the skulls of some of the dead and modelled faces on them in plaster, probably as a way of honouring ancestors. Ain Ghazal also produced large plaster statues. Long-distance exchange flourished, with obsidian from central and eastern Anatolia travelling hundreds of kilometres to the Levant, showing that early farming communities were linked by wide networks of contact.

Why did people start farming?

Scholars have proposed many explanations, and most now think several factors combined.

• Climate: Ofer Bar-Yosef and others argued that the cold, dry Younger Dryas period (c. 10,900-9700 BC) put pressure on Natufian foragers, encouraging them to plant wild cereals. The warmer, more stable climate of the early Holocene then made farming more productive.
• Hilly flanks: Robert Braidwood, who excavated Jarmo in Iraqi Kurdistan from 1948, argued that farming began in the hill country where wild ancestors lived naturally.
• Population pressure: Lewis Binford and Kent Flannery suggested that growing numbers of people in favourable areas pushed groups into marginal zones, where they began cultivating to increase food supplies.
• Feasting and social competition: Brian Hayden proposed that ambitious individuals encouraged the production of surplus food and drink for feasts.
• Ideas and religion: The French prehistorian Jacques Cauvin argued that a “revolution of symbols”, visible in new art and ritual, came before and enabled farming. Göbekli Tepe is often cited in this debate.

No single theory explains every region. Many researchers now favour “niche construction” models, in which people gradually reshaped their environment and their relationship with plants and animals without planning a farming economy.

Consequences

Farming could feed far more people per square kilometre than foraging. Populations grew rapidly in what demographers call the Neolithic demographic transition, marked by higher birth rates in farming communities.

The costs were real. Skeletons from early farming villages often show shorter stature, more tooth decay, signs of repetitive strain from grinding grain and more infectious disease, as people lived close together and with their animals. In a widely read 1987 essay, the geographer Jared Diamond called agriculture “the worst mistake in the history of the human race”, a deliberately provocative view that many archaeologists consider one-sided.

Farming also changed societies. Stored food, land and herds could be owned and inherited, which opened the way to greater inequality. Over the following millennia came pottery, metallurgy, irrigation, writing and the first cities, such as Uruk in Mesopotamia.

From the Near East, farming spread west through Anatolia and the Aegean into Europe from about 6500 BC, carried largely by migrating farmers, as ancient DNA studies have confirmed. It also spread to Egypt and South Asia. This expansion is described in Spread of Farming into Europe.

The Fertile Crescent was not the only birthplace of agriculture. Farming arose independently in China (rice and millet), New Guinea, Mesoamerica (maize, beans and squash), the Andes, eastern North America and probably sub-Saharan Africa. The Near East is, however, the earliest well-documented centre and the source of the crops that became the basis of farming in Europe and western Asia.

Myths and facts

• Myth: Farming was a sudden invention by a single genius or group. Fact: It developed over thousands of years in several places at once.
• Myth: Farmers immediately lived better than foragers. Fact: Early farmers often worked harder and had poorer health; farming’s advantage was the number of people it could support.
• Myth: Villages came after farming. Fact: In the Levant, sedentary villages came first, with the Natufians.

Timeline

• c. 21,000 BC: Foragers at Ohalo II on the Sea of Galilee gather wild wheat and barley.
• c. 12,500 BC: The Natufian culture builds the first sedentary villages in the Levant.
• c. 10,900-9700 BC: The Younger Dryas cold period.
• c. 9500 BC: Start of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A; cultivation of wild-type cereals.
• c. 9000 BC: Monumental enclosures at Göbekli Tepe are in use.
• c. 8500 BC: Domesticated cereals and the first domestic sheep, goats and cattle appear.
• c. 7100 BC: Çatalhöyük is founded in central Anatolia.
• c. 6500 BC: Farming begins to spread into south-eastern Europe.
• 1936: V. Gordon Childe publishes Man Makes Himself, popularising the term “Neolithic Revolution”.

Why it matters

The Neolithic Revolution is the foundation of almost everything that followed in human history. It made possible permanent settlements, large populations, specialised crafts, states and cities. It also brought new diseases, inequality and environmental change. Understanding how and why it happened in the Fertile Crescent helps explain the world that farming created.