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10,000 B.C - Neolithic Revolution Begins

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10,000 B.C - Neolithic Revolution Begins

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The Neolithic Revolution impacted the fertile crescent. Humans first took up farming. Shortly after, Stone Age humans in other parts of the world also began to practice agriculture.

https://www.history.com/topics/pre-history/neolithic-revolution#:~:text=The%20Neolithic%20Revolution%20started%20around,also%20began%20to%20practice%20agriculture.

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The Neolithic Revolution, also called the Agricultural Revolution, marked the transition in human history from small, nomadic bands of hunter-gatherers to larger, agricultural settlements and early civilization. The Neolithic Revolution started around 10,000 B.C. in the Fertile Crescent, a boomerang-shaped region of the Middle East where humans first took up farming. Shortly after, Stone Age humans in other parts of the world also began to practice agriculture. Civilizations and cities grew out of the innovations of the Neolithic Revolution.

Neolithic Age

The Neolithic Age is sometimes called the New Stone Age. Neolithic humans used stone tools like their earlier Stone Age ancestors, who eked out a marginal existence in small bands of hunter-gatherers during the last Ice Age.

Australian archaeologist V. Gordon Childe coined the term "Neolithic Revolution" in 1935 to describe the radical and important period of change in which humans began cultivating plants, breeding animals for food and forming permanent settlements. The advent of agriculture separated Neolithic people from their Paleolithic ancestors.

Many facets of modern civilization can be traced to this moment in history when people started living together in communities.

Causes of the Neolithic Revolution

There was no single factor that led humans to begin farming roughly 12,000 years ago. The causes of the Neolithic Revolution may have varied from region to region.

The Earth entered a warming trend around 14,000 years ago at the end of the last Ice Age. Some scientists theorize that climate changes drove the Agricultural Revolution.

In the Fertile Crescent, bounded on the west by the Mediterranean Sea and on the east by the Persian Gulf, wild wheat and barley began to grow as it got warmer. Pre-Neolithic people called Natufians started building permanent houses in the region.

Other scientists suggest that intellectual advances in the human brain may have caused people to settle down. Religious artifacts and artistic imagery-progenitors of human civilization-have been uncovered at the earliest Neolithic settlements.

The Neolithic Era began when some groups of humans gave up the nomadic, hunter-gatherer lifestyle completely to begin farming. It may have taken humans hundreds or even thousands of years to transition fully from a lifestyle of subsisting on wild plants to keeping small gardens and later tending large crop fields.

Neolithic Humans

The archaeological site of Çatalhöyük in southern Turkey is one of the best-preserved Neolithic settlements. Studying Çatalhöyük has given researchers a better understanding of the transition from a nomadic life of hunting and gathering to an agriculture lifestyle.

Archaeologists have unearthed more than a dozen mud-brick dwellings at the 9,500 year-old Çatalhöyük. They estimate that as many as 8,000 people may have lived here at one time. The houses were clustered so closely back-to-back that residents had to enter the homes through a hole in the roof.

The inhabitants of Çatalhöyük appear to have valued art and spirituality. They buried their dead under the floors of their houses. The walls of the homes are covered with murals of men hunting, cattle and female goddesses.

Some of the earliest evidence of farming comes from the archaeological site of Tell Abu Hureyra, a small village located along the Euphrates River in modern Syria. The village was inhabited from roughly 11,500 to 7,000 B.C.

Inhabitants of Tell Abu Hureyra initially hunted gazelle and other game. Around 9,700 B.C. they began to harvest wild grains. Several large stone tools for grinding grain have been found at the site.

Agricultural Inventions

Plant domestication: Cereals such as emmer wheat, einkorn wheat and barley were among the first crops domesticated by Neolithic farming communities in the Fertile Crescent. These early farmers also domesticated lentils, chickpeas, peas and flax.

Domestication is the process by which farmers select for desirable traits by breeding successive generations of a plant or animal. Over time, a domestic species becomes different from its wild relative.

Neolithic farmers selected for crops that harvested easily. Wild wheat, for instance, falls to the ground and shatters when it is ripe. Early humans bred for wheat that stayed on the stem for easier harvesting.

Around the same time that farmers were beginning to sow wheat in the Fertile Crescent, people in Asia started to grow rice and millet. Scientists have discovered archaeological remnants of Stone Age rice paddies in Chinese swamps dating back at least 7,700 years.

In Mexico, squash cultivation began about 10,000 years ago, while maize-like crops emerged around 9,000 years ago.

Livestock: The first livestock were domesticated from animals that Neolithic humans hunted for meat. Domestic pigs were bred from wild boars, for instance, while goats came from the Persian ibex. Domesticated animals made the hard, physical labor of farming possible while their milk and meat added variety to the human diet. They also carried infectious diseases: smallpox, influenza and the measles all spread from domesticated animals to humans.

The first farm animals also included sheep and cattle. These originated in Mesopotamia between 10,000 and 13,000 years ago. Water buffalo and yak were domesticated shortly after in China, India and Tibet.

Draft animals including oxen, donkeys and camels appeared much later-around 4,000 B.C.-as humans developed trade routes for transporting goods.

Effects of the Neolithic Revolution

The Neolithic Revolution led to masses of people establishing permanent settlements supported by farming and agriculture. It paved the way for the innovations of the ensuing Bronze Age and Iron Age, when advancements in creating tools for farming, wars and art swept the world and brought civilizations together through trade and conquest.

Sources

The Development of Agriculture; National Geographic.
The Seeds of Civilization; Smithsonian Magazine.

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The Neolithic Revolution, also called the Agricultural Revolution, marked the transition in human history from small, nomadic bands of hunter-gatherers to larger, agricultural settlements and early civilization. It started around 10,000 B.C.

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Gunpowder is one of the Four Great Inventions of China. Originally developed by the Taoists for medicinal purposes, gunpowder was first used for warfare around 904 AD. It spread throughout most parts of Eurasia by the end of the 13th century.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunpowder#:~:text=Gunpowder%20is%20one%20of%20the,end%20of%20the%2013th%20century.

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1492 - Columbus discovers the "Americas"

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1492 - Columbus discovers the "Americas"

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The impact of Christopher Columbus's voyages to the Americas was the death of countless indigenous peoples via murder and disease, the introduction of European travel to the Americas, and the displacement and enslavement of indigenous peoples for many years to come.

https://www.enotes.com/homework-help/what-is-the-impact-of-christopher-columbus-s-100801

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The Industrial Revolution had many positive effects. Among those was an increase in wealth, the production of goods, and the standard of living. People had access to healthier diets, better housing, and cheaper goods. In addition, education increased during the Industrial Revolution.

https://www.lcps.org/cms/lib4/VA01000195/Centricity/Domain/10599/Social%20Effects%20of%20the%20Industrial%20Revolution.pdf

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Plastics made possible the development of computers, cell phones, and most of the lifesaving advances of modern medicine. Lightweight and good for insulation, plastics help save fossil fuels used in heating and in transportation.

https://www.sciencehistory.org/the-history-and-future-of-plastics

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Due to the green revolution, India lost almost 1 lakh varieties of indigenous rice (Prasad, 2016). Since the time of the green revolution, there was reduced cultivation of indigenous varieties of rice, millets, lentils, etc. In turn, there was increased harvest of hybrid crops, which would grow faster (Taylor, 2019).

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fsufs.2021.644559/full#:~:text=Due%20to%20the%20green%20revolution,faster%20(Taylor%2C%202019).

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7/20/1969 - Neil Armstrong first steps on the Moon

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7/20/1969 - Neil Armstrong first steps on the Moon

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Apollo also provided our first detailed look at another planetary body. And it showed us how special the Earth-Moon system is. It was the Apollo 11 mission that demonstrated convincingly for the first time how ancient the Moon is — the samples brought back were more than 3 billion years old.

https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2019/07/17/apollo-11-moon-landing-science/

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How Landing on the Moon Changed Our World

Sean Solomon has served as the director of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory since 2012. Much of his recent research has focused on the geology and geophysics of the solar system's inner planets. He was the principal investigator for NASA's MESSENGER mission, which sent the first spacecraft to orbit Mercury and study the planet's composition, geology, topography, gravity and magnetic fields, exosphere, magnetosphere, and heliospheric environment.

The beginning of Solomon's research career coincided with the birth of a new field - planetary science. Below, he explains how Apollo 11 affected the scientific community at that time, how Lamont was involved, and what comes next for lunar exploration.

Solomon discussed these topics and more during a panel discussion entitled " Small Steps and Giant Leaps: How Apollo 11 Shaped Our Understanding of Earth and Beyond " on July 17. The event, hosted in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing, was co-sponsored by the American Geophysical Union and the National Archives.
At what point were you in your career when Apollo 11 landed the first humans on the Moon?
I was a graduate student at MIT, and I was doing a thesis in seismology. However, I had written a paper about the interior structure of the Moon before the Apollo 11 mission. MIT faculty and students were holding discussions about the Moon in advance of the Apollo 11 landing, so we were primed to think about the impact of the mission's findings.
How did the Moon landing affect you personally?
I was glued to the television set watching the landing and the Moon walks like everybody else. It was a singular event in history for humans to walk on another planetary body. It captivated everyone. The landing and Neil Armstrong's first steps onto the lunar surface were watched, I would guess, by billions of people on this planet. So, it was a great event for the world's population to come together and marvel at a profound technological achievement.

In terms of my own work, the mission led to an explosion of new data about the Moon. I included lunar work in my research agenda for a number of years thereafter, using data from all of the Apollo missions, from the findings of sample analyses to the observations from the orbital and surface experiments that Apollo carried.
How did this mission affect the scientific community as a whole?
There was really no field of planetary science in 1969, just a handful of people who called themselves planetary astronomers and studied other worlds through telescopes or with theoretical work. NASA had sent spacecraft to Venus and Mars by the time of Apollo 11, so there were a few people who were working on planetary data, but the space age was less than 12 years old at the time of the first Moon landing. Almost everybody who worked on the scientific return from the Apollo program came from other fields - earth science, chemistry, or physics - and they became lunar scientists. NASA's investments brought in huge numbers of scientific experts and funded new instruments and labs across the county to create a lunar community that hadn't been there before.

It's also important to remember that nearly coincident with the Apollo program was an explosion of robotic missions to explore other parts of the solar system. Within a few years of Apollo 11 we had launched spacecraft to fly by Mars, Venus, Mercury, Jupiter, and Saturn. It was an enormous expansion of our presence in space that was enabled by a healthy NASA built up to conduct the Apollo missions but an agency that also had the budget and the engineering expertise to figure out how to explore the rest of the solar system by spacecraft. The field of planetary science came into its own in those few years after Apollo.
Can you tell me a little bit about Lamont's involvement with Apollo 11?
Lamont was very heavily involved in the Apollo program and was much more active in planetary research than it is now. There were Lamont scientists who were in line to receive some of the first samples brought back from the Moon. At least equally importantly, Lamont was a leader in the geophysical exploration of the Moon. Over the course of the Apollo missions there were several geophysical experiments, but the one that spanned nearly all of the missions was the passive seismic experiment. And several early Lamont seismologists had teamed together to put that experiment on Apollo, including Maurice Ewing, Frank Press, Gary Latham - the principal investigator - and other team members from Lamont as well.

In later Apollo missions, astronauts measured the heat flowing out from the lunar interior. The Apollo Heat Flow Experiment was led by Marcus Langseth, a Lamont scientist for whom our current research ship is named. Also, during the Apollo 17 mission, there was a gravimeter that was mounted on the astronauts' rover to measure the variation in lunar gravity over the course of the rover traverse. That experiment was led by Manik Talwani, who by then was the Lamont director.
Ewing was studying seismology in the ocean basins before he was contacted by NASA. How does that relate to studying seismology on the Moon?
Ewing pioneered the use of seismology to study the crust beneath the oceans. He took seismic experiments to a venue where there had never been such experiments before. And with them he showed that oceanic crust is different from continental crust. So when he had the opportunity to send a seismometer to the Moon, it was another chance to make seismic experiments in a new place, just as he had done in the oceans, and he was sure he'd learn something new.
Why is learning about the Moon so important to us?
Landing humans on the Moon and bringing them back safely was a formidable technological challenge. And the time within which that was accomplished was incredibly short. The first human spaceflight was in 1961. Kennedy's speech announcing that we would go to the Moon before the end of the decade was in 1961. Within only eight years we not only figured out how to send humans to the Moon and get them back, but we actually did it. That was the first time in human history that a person set foot on another planetary body. It's something that will never happen again.

Apollo also provided our first detailed look at another planetary body. And it showed us how special the Earth-Moon system is. It was the Apollo 11 mission that demonstrated convincingly for the first time how ancient the Moon is - the samples brought back were more than 3 billion years old. We learned that the Moon recorded and illuminated a period of solar system history that we hadn't begun to appreciate through our study of Earth. There's no rock record on Earth for the first half billion years, but there is on the Moon. And because the Moon is our satellite, it's part of our history, too. We learned how violent and chaotic the earliest history of the solar system was. We wouldn't have gained that perspective without leaving Earth.
How do you think we were able to send humans to the moon so quickly?
As a nation, we put a big priority on meeting the goal that Kennedy set out. And throughout most of the 1960s we had Democratic presidents, Kennedy and Johnson, who were supportive of that program. In the 60s, the funding was there, and America's reputation was at stake. There were military implications to the control of space. We were in the middle of the Cold War. There were many reasons we put the resources behind the Apollo program. NASA was a pretty daring agency at that time. They were willing to take risks. They didn't want to risk more human lives than they needed to, but the astronauts were putting their lives on the line. The first astronauts were test pilots, who risked their lives every day over the course of their work; they knew what the risks were. NASA was a different agency back in the 60s than it has been since. Their engineers and managers set their sights high and did what they needed to do to meet schedules. And they had the resources to do it.
How have lunar missions changed from the time of Apollo 11 to present day?
When the Apollo program was underway we were sending two missions a year to different parts of the Moon. There was to have been an Apollo 18, an Apollo 19, and an Apollo 20, but these were expensive missions, and in 1972 the U.S. was spending a lot of money fighting the war in Vietnam. Those missions were cancelled, even though all of the hardware had been built and the astronauts that would fly those missions had been selected, and that decision ended the Apollo program. It was a challenge to devise experiments that could build on Apollo's legacy and yet be done inexpensively with robotic spacecraft, which were being sent to many other targets - Mars, Venus, Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn, and, a few years later, Uranus and Neptune.

NASA did not return again to the Moon until the 1990s, with the Clementine orbiter - sponsored jointly with the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization - and the Lunar Prospector orbiter. Ten years ago, NASA launched the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which is still operating at the Moon, and other missions have followed. Space organizations in other countries have also launched lunar missions, including the Soviet Union prior to and even after the Apollo missions, and later Japan, India, China, and Israel. In the U.S. and abroad, there are commercial entities that have their sights set on lunar landing. And earlier this year NASA announced plans to send the first woman and the next man to the Moon by 2024. If that goal is to be met, partnership with the commercial sector will be needed.
What do you hope the takeaway of the reignited interest surrounding the Moon landing will be?
I hope for two takeaway messages. First, the Apollo 11 mission was not only a remarkable technological achievement in the history of our species, but it also marked a "giant leap" in our appreciation of Earth's place in our planetary system. And second, the Moon today still holds answers to important questions about the early history of our planet, and there remain myriad scientific as well as political and commercial reasons to return.

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How Landing on the Moon Changed Our World

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Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory director Sean Solomon discusses how Apollo 11 affected the scientific community, how Lamont was involved, and what comes next for lunar exploration.

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The Syrian Civil War has caused the implementation of new immigration policies in various countries. Similarly, this massive influx of immigrants in new countries, has impacted the economy of these countries, as well as Syrian's own economy-since much of the labor force has left for their own safety.

https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/926483299c9048f99cec7bc0f4c0443c