Insights to Humanity's "Nature Religions": The Neolithic Revolution

This is a six part series of short postings of a longer article viewable at this link: Insights to Humanity's "Nature Religions".  These shorter periodic postings may make reviewing the article more time efficient for you.

The transformation from wandering hunter-gatherer societies to ones based on agriculture, resulted in dramatic regional population growth. 

This “Agricultural Revolution” as it is called, is regarded by many anthropologists as the single most important contributor to modern, organized society and the many civilizations that rose and fell thereafter.  Also known as the Neolithic Revolution, it was a gradual process that took place in many parts of the world as early as 11,000 BC, but some evidence suggests it may have started as far back 17,000 BC, some 19,000 years ago. 

The transition is believed to have started in the Fertile Crescent, a region that includes parts of modern-day Egypt, Israel, Jordan, and Iran, as a result of the end of the Ice Age leading to warmer temperatures.  This made it possible to cultivate plants and raise animals, and population growth necessitated the need for more food resulting in development of farming that provided more food per acre. This transition led to the development of permanent settlements, cities, and civilizations. It also led to the domestication of plants and animals, which has resulted in the increase of the global human population from a few million to the nearly eight billion of today. 

This has resulted in a drawback.  For example whereas the world contained roughly 6,200 million hectares (15,320 million acres) of tree cover just before the widespread change to agriculture, this has decreased steadily and inexorably over the millennia until we get to the industrial revolution and its demand for timber and food. Today, the forested area of the world stands at roughly 4,000 million hectares (9,884 million acres), primarily due to land being converted to agricultural use.  

Before the agricultural revolution, the variety of plants and tubers that humans ate easily exceeded 1,000 species. Today however, there are essentially only 20 species that feed the bulk of our human population, and this loss of diversity has had negative consequences for human health.  

Moreover, with agriculture and the inevitable land ownership which followed, large-scale conflicts between clans, tribes, and later, nations, became common.  It was, however, more common that many northern peoples continued their hunter gatherer ways rather than participate in the Neolithic agricultural revolution because the frigid climates were unsuitable for large-scale agriculture in the cold northern climate.


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