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Stone Age 101 - Part 6

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Previous – Mesolithic (Denmark) Stone Age 101 - Part 5

Next – Chalcolithic (Austria and South Tyrol) Stone Age 101 - Part 7

Our sixth installment brings us to a very important time in human History. The so called Neolithic revolution. Again the Neolithic can be seen as a phenomenon, archeologically speaking there are 4 requirements a culture has to meet to qualify as "Neolithic". These are: Agriculture and stock farming, pottery, permanent settlements and sanded stone tools. As you might guess these requirements appeared at different places at different times, but the forerunners where the people living in the Middle East around the Fertile Crescent and the later biblical holy land. That is where our representative couple hails from, to be precise Jericho.

This is a very important site with some of the oldest urban structures in the world. There the beginning of the  Neolithic is called the Pre-Pottery Neolithic since in this early phase containers were not made from pottery but materials like chalk - the so called white ware like the woman in the picture is holding. The two stone artifacts shown are on the right a sanded stone axe - one of the most characteristic Neolithic tools across all cultures. The object on the right is part of a sickle blade - like the one the man is holding. This was of course a very important tool for agricultural societies. Emmer and Einkorn are among the earliest crops that helped revolutionize human diet.

Archeozoological evidence shows, that goats are the oldest stock animals, and even today all domestic goats are the descendants of the Bezoar goat - like the one depicted here.

The pearls the woman is wearing in her hair are also grounded in reality, since green pearls (from various materials) where found at Jericho. Some archeologists think they have something to do with a new fertility cult.

Religion saw an interesting development at this time. From Jericho we know that people preserved the skulls of their dead and then covered them in clay to reconstruct the face. Another important Neolithic site is Catal Hüyük in Anatolia where the bull was worshipped.

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FrustratedInExcelsis's avatar

The Neolithic Revolution is absolutely fascinating to me on a biologic level. What I mean, think of humans and human prehistory from an environmental or evolutionary angle -- neolithic and mesolithic humans were predators, primarily, and very successful and capable ones at that. Neolithic peoples in particular were megafaunal predators, whose usual prey started at deer size and went all the way up to mammoths. You'd have seen a very meat-heavy diet, with plant food mainly there as supplements.


Then comes the end of the last glacial maximum, megafauna starts dying off, environments undergo rapid changes, and more and more societies start turning to farming to ensure stable food supplies. What this leads to, in a lot of places, is a complete turnover in diet -- all those Near Eastern, Chinese and Mesoamerican peoples end up with a diet consisting primarily of grains, root vegetables, and leafy greens, and as times passes more and more people start to live like that.


A species of carnivores choosing to become a species of herbivores. Isn't that just fascinating?