The period when human beings learned how to farm the land and started to live in permanent settlements—but still used tools made of stone, bones or wood—is called the Neolithic period, or the New Stone Age. It began approximately 9500 BC (11,500 years ago) in the Middle East and continued until the beginning of the Bronze Age around 4500 BC (6500 years ago). In Northern Europe, the Neolithic lasted until about 1700 BC, while in China it extended to 2000 BC. In some other regions, including the Pacific Islands and North America, the Neolithic way of life continued until Europeans arrived just a few hundred years ago.

The first farmers

During the Palaeolithic (Old Stone Age), humans roamed from place to place in small groups following the animals they hunted and foraging for wild plants close to wherever they set up camp. Over time, some nomadic people started to settle in one place, building permanent houses gathered together in villages. They were adopting what is called a sedentary (non-nomadic) way of life. These people became farmers, learning how domesticate wild cereals—plants they were used to gathering wherever they grew and which they knew to be suitable for producing food—and cultivate crops that produced a reliable harvest each year.
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Neolithic Revolution

Such was the dramatic change in the way people lived that this chapter in the story of humans, which began around 9500 BC (11,500 years ago), has been called the "Neolithic Revolution" or the "Agricultural Revolution". But it was not a sudden event that took place in days or weeks like, for example, the French Revolution. People who underwent the shift in lifestyle from nomadic hunter-gatherers to settled farmers did so over many generations. To begin with, they may have settled in one place for just a season at a time, but gradually lengthened their stay until they put down permanent roots.

Fertile Crescent

The Neolithic Revolution began in the Fertile Crescent, a lush, crescent-shaped region of the Middle East stretching between the Mediterranean Sea and the Persian Gulf, and bordered by desert in the south and mountains to the north and east.

There were probably a number of groups of people living across this region who changed from being foragers to farmers. They did so independently from one another, and at different times.
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The evidence suggests that people first started to domesticate wild cereals in the Levant, the southwestern arm of the Fertile Crescent (modern-day Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan and western Syria). This practice then spread to other parts of the region: Anatolia (present-day Turkey), Mesopotamia (the lands between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in modern-day Iraq) and northern Egypt. Fom those places it travelled to regions further afield: North Africa, South Asia and Europe.

Neolithic culture was introduced to Europe from Anatolia. It may have been spread by migrants, travelling people who brought their domesticated plants and animals with them, or through trade, or by both means. The shift from a nomadic, foraging way of life to a settled, farming lifestyle took around 2500 years to spread across the continent. It began in Greece and the Aegean islands 6500 years ago, reaching Britain about 4000 years ago.
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The Neolithic way of life emerged independently all over the world at different times. In northern China, another cereal, millet, was domesticated around 8000 years ago. This was followed by soya beans, oranges and peaches. In southern China, rice farming emerged along the River Yangtze probably around 9400 years ago. From there, the Austronesian people, whose homeland this was believed to be, took both rice and millet cultivation practices with them as they migrated—thousands of years later—to Taiwan, Southeast Asia, the Philippines and the Pacific Islands.
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In the Americas, where no contact would be made with people from other parts of the world until Medieval times, the native peoples discovered how to domesticate plants and animals and live settled lives as farmers. In Mexico, squash cultivation began about 10,000 years ago, while maize-like crops, domesticated from their wild ancestor teosinte, emerged around 9000 years ago.

Probably there were different factors at work in different regions. In some places, environmental changes—the gradual warming of the climate at the end of the Ice Age—allowed local people to begin cultivating plants and herding animals in abundance. Elsewhere, the decreasing numbers of large animals to hunt (caused partly by over-hunting, partly by the changing climate) might have led to experimentation with cultivating wild plants as an alternative source of food. In other places, the urge to worship gods may have led people to come together and form communities, and then learn how to farm in order to provide a reliable food source for the community.

We know that first permanent human settlements were built some 3000–3500 years before agriculture began around 9500 BC (11,500 years ago). And archaeological evidence from the sites of these ancient settlements suggests that—in some parts of the world at least—religious worship could have driven the Neolithic Revolution.

The Natufians

Archaeologists have discovered settlements dating as far back as 13,000 BC (15,000 years ago) in the Levant. Known as Natufian villages (they are named after a valley near the first of these sites to be found), they emerged across the Levant at the end of the last Ice Age, a time when the region's climate was becoming warmer and wetter.

Although the Natufians lived in permanent settlements of up to several hundred people, they were foragers, not farmers. They are sometimes described as a "Pre-Neolithic" people. They hunted gazelles that roamed their neighbourhood and gathered wild rye, barley and wheat that grew nearby. They buried their dead under their houses. Carved female figurines and wild bull horns have also been found by archaeologists, suggesting the Natufians held some kind of religious beliefs.
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Around 10,800 BC, a "mini ice age" descended on the Natufians' homeland. Temperatures fell sharply and the climate became drier, causing plant and animal habitats to shrink. It meant that many villagers could no longer continue their settled lifestyle, so they abandoned their homes and turned to foraging and hunting once more.

​​​​​​​Some of the villagers, however, tried to adjust to the new conditions. From evidence discovered at the site of Abu Hureyra in northern Syria—tools used for grinding grain into flour, dated to 9700 BC—some archaeologists think that the local villagers set about trying to cultivate rye, perhaps replanting it and harvesting it. In this way, the Natufians developed a form of agriculture (and possibly beginning the long process of domestication) in order for their villages to survive.

The temple is made up of at least seven stone circles, consisting of T-shaped limestone pillars carved with animals—gazelles, snakes, foxes, scorpions, wild boars and birds. The pillars might have supported roofs. Built 7000 years before the Great Pyramid of Giza, Göbekli Tepe was, to our knowledge, the first structure built that was bigger than a hut. Nothing like it existed anywhere else in the world.
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Some researchers think that Göbekli Tepe was such an important holy place that people visited from far around, perhaps bringing gifts and tributes to the temple's priests. The need to feed all the people who worked and attended ceremonies may have led to the mass harvesting of wild cereals and perhaps the creation of some of the first domesticated types. One area where farming began is thought to be in southern Turkey, just 100 kilometres (60 miles) northeast of Göbekli Tepe. Some of the first evidence for plant domestication comes from Nevalı Çori (pronounced Nuh-var-LUH CHO-ree), a settlement even closer.
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Çatal Höyük

The archaeological site of Çatal Höyük (pronounced Chah-tahl-HEW-yook) in southern Turkey, dated to 7500 BC (9500 years ago), is one of the best-preserved Neolithic settlements. Archaeologists think that as many as 8000 people may have lived here at one time. The houses were packed so closely together that the inhabitants had to enter their homes through a hole in the roof, which they reached by climbing ladders. The roof was supported by beams from the inside. The rough ground was covered by platforms, mats and skins on which people slept.
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The residents of Çatal Höyük, located in the middle of marshlands, cultivated wheat and barley as well as lentils, peas and other legumes. They herded sheep and goats. But their fields lay far away beyond the marshes, suggesting that being close to the marshland's thick clay—which the villagers used to make plaster—was important to them. It may provide further evidence that it was the urge to worship together, rather than the discovery of the benefits of agriculture, that first brought people together to live in settlements like Çatal Höyük.

Neolithic tools

Throughout the Stone Age, tools were made by chipping, or "knapping", stones. This involved the removal of flakes using either a hammer stone or a "soft" hammer made from bone or antler. Now that they were farmers, Neolithic people needed new tools for a range of different tasks. To help them harvest and process their crops, for example, they needed sickle blades and grinding stones. To fell trees in order to clear land for cultivation they needed axes. To construct shelters or canoes, they needed adzes (cutting tools similar to axes but with the cutting edge at right angles to the handle rather than parallel) to shape the wood.
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Plant domestication

Thousands of years before the Neolithic period, foraging people harvested wild cereals by cutting off the heads, containing the seeds (grain), from the plants just before they ripened and the seeds dispersed naturally. Over time, people may have tended and protected "their" patches, but the plants they watched over were still wild. Gradually, they learned to domesticate these plants, so they could both make harvesting easier and improve the yield.
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Domestication involves selecting for desirable traits (qualities) in plants (or animals) while breeding one generation after another. What traits were these early plant breeders looking for? Wild wheat falls to the ground and "shatters" when it is ripe—the seeds break off the plant and fall to the ground, making them difficult to harvest when fully ripe. So farmers bred varieties of wheat in which the seed stayed on the stem when it was ripe, making harvesting much easier. They sowed the land they cleared of other plants and trees with these new varieties, creating fields of domesticated wheat. This was the true beginning of agriculture.
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Cereals such as emmer wheat, einkorn wheat and barley, were among the first crops domesticated by Neolithic farming communities of the Levant. These early farmers also domesticated lentils, chickpeas, peas and flax.

Animal domestication

As Neolithic people began to experiment with cultivation, they also started domesticating animals. The first livestock were bred from animals that people once hunted for their meat and skins. Evidence of sheep and goat herding has been found in Iraq and Turkey about 12,000 years ago. By about 6900–6400 BC (8900–8400 years ago), people had learned to domesticate cattle and pigs.

Native animals were domesticated in other parts of the world. They included: horses (in Central Asia), camels (Arabia, Horn of Africa and Central Asia), llamas (South American Andes), water buffalo (India and East Asia) and yaks (Himalayas).
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Wealth and power

To possess livestock gave some people great wealth—wealth that they could pass on to their families when they died. Perhaps it was this that caused the beginnings of social inequality during the Neolithic period. Burial mounds, which started to appear during this time, would have required considerable time and labour to build—evidence that some powerful individuals (those of greater wealth and higher social rank) were able to organize human labour for their own needs. Differences in wealth between communities probably led to warfare between them, hence the building of walls and ditches around villages (and evidence of broken bones). It is likely that warring tribes were headed by chiefs.

Birth of civilization

The Neolithic Revolution led to the dramatic growth in human population. As the early farmers became better at cultivating crops and raising their animals, they produced more food than the community needed at any one time—a surplus. These surpluses could be stored for later use, or perhaps traded with nearby communities for other necessities or luxuries. Such a reliable supply of food meant that farming populations grew faster than those of nomads—who could not even be sure where their next meal was coming from.