40 Fun Facts About The Neolithic Revolution

Which region between the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf is believed to be where settled farming first emerged?

The Fertile Crescent was home to the wild ancestors of wheat, barley, peas and lentils, and of sheep, goats, pigs and cattle. Few regions offered would-be farmers so much to work with.

Which animal did hunter-gatherers domesticate during the last Ice Age, thousands of years before the first farm animals?

The dog is the only large carnivore humans have ever domesticated. It descends from wolves that took up with hunting bands in the Pleistocene, long before anyone planted a field.

Which crop, bred in southern Mexico from the wild grass teosinte, is grown with beans and squash as the Three Sisters?

Maize looks nothing like teosinte, whose tiny ears hold five to ten seeds, each sealed in a hard case. In a Three Sisters plot the maize stalk gives the beans a pole to climb.

Skeletons show that early farmers, compared with the hunter-gatherers who came before them, were on average what?

Shorter: studies around the world find that people lost height once they took up farming. Their cereal-heavy diets held more starch but less protein and fewer micronutrients than foraged food.

A gene variant that spread after the Neolithic Revolution lets many adults digest which food?

Milk contains the sugar lactose, which most mammals stop digesting after weaning. The trait called lactase persistence evolved only after people began keeping dairy animals.

Which animal, drawn to the rodents in early farmers' grain stores, was buried beside a human on Cyprus 9,500 years ago?

The cat is not native to Cyprus, so farmers must have carried it across the sea by boat. Wildcats first moved in on their own terms, hunting the mice that infested villages.

Which Middle Eastern town, called the world's oldest fortified city, had a stone wall and tower by about 8000 BCE?

Jericho's tower stood over 8.5 metres tall, with a staircase of 22 stone steps inside. The villagers who raised it had not yet learned to make pottery.

Which monument, raised by Britain's Neolithic farmers, includes bluestones hauled from the Preseli Hills in Wales?

Stonehenge's builders owed about three-quarters of their ancestry to farmers who had migrated from the continent and a quarter to Europe's older hunter-gatherers, DNA from Neolithic burials shows.

Which pack animal did Andean peoples breed from the wild guanaco, a slender relative of the camel?

The llama gave Andean peoples both meat and a way to carry loads along mountain trails. DNA shows its smaller cousin the alpaca was bred from a different wild species, the vicuña.

The word Neolithic, coined by the Victorian banker John Lubbock, joins two Greek words that together mean what?

New stone was Lubbock's label for the later Stone Age, with its ground and polished tools. He coined Palaeolithic, for the older age of chipped flint, at the same time.

Which Australian archaeologist coined the term Neolithic Revolution, describing it in his book Man Makes Himself?

V. Gordon Childe chose the word revolution to stress how deeply farming changed the communities that took it up. His best-known dig uncovered the Neolithic village of Skara Brae in Scotland.

Which Neolithic settlement in Turkey had no streets, so people crossed the rooftops and entered their homes by ladder?

Çatalhöyük's houses were packed together like a honeycomb, and families buried their dead in pits beneath the floors of the rooms they lived in.

Which hilltop site in Turkey has carved T-shaped stone pillars raised by hunter-gatherers more than 11,000 years ago?

Göbekli Tepe means Potbelly Hill in Turkish, and its pillars are among the world's oldest known megaliths. Many carry reliefs of wild animals such as foxes, boars and vultures.

Which Scottish island group holds Skara Brae, a Neolithic village whose houses still contain stone beds and dressers?

Orkney's Skara Brae lay hidden in coastal sand dunes until a storm exposed its stone walls. Its people raised cattle, pigs and sheep, and seed grains show they grew barley too.

Newgrange, a passage tomb raised in Neolithic Ireland, is aligned so sunrise floods its chamber on which occasion?

Winter solstice sunlight enters through a roofbox above the entrance and reaches the inner chamber. Built more than 5,000 years ago, Newgrange is older than the Egyptian pyramids.

On which Pacific island did highlanders at Kuk Swamp dig drainage ditches and invent farming for themselves?

New Guinea highlanders grew taro at Kuk Swamp and later bananas and sugar cane. UNESCO lists it as one of the places in the world where people developed agriculture on their own.

Which staple crop was first domesticated around Lake Titicaca, in the high Andes of Peru and Bolivia?

The potato has a single origin, genetic studies show, in that one corner of the Andes. Centuries of selective breeding have since produced more than 5,000 varieties.

Which cereal did Neolithic villagers along China's Yangtze River domesticate about 9,000 years ago?

Rice suited the wet south, while farmers along northern China's Yellow River domesticated millet instead. The two farming worlds met and mixed between 9,000 and 7,000 years ago.

Which small rodent, now a popular children's pet, was first domesticated in the Andes as a source of meat?

The guinea pig, known in the Andes as cuy, is still raised for the table by many highland households. Andean communities have also used it in folk medicine and religious ceremonies.

Which stone from volcanoes in central Turkey did Neolithic villagers trade widely, prizing its razor-sharp edge?

Obsidian is a natural glass, formed when lava cools too quickly for crystals to grow. Glass from those Turkish volcanoes was reaching the Levant thousands of years before anyone farmed there.

Which author argued in Guns, Germs, and Steel that Eurasia's east–west axis let crops and livestock spread quickly?

Jared Diamond reasoned that crops and animals travel easily along one latitude, where the climate stays similar, but stall on a north–south route. The book won a Pulitzer Prize in 1998.

Farming began early in which geological epoch, the warm period that started about 11,700 years ago and continues today?

The Holocene brought a steadier climate after the last glacial period, and some researchers argue that this new stability is what allowed agriculture to develop at all.

Which huge wild ox, painted on Ice Age cave walls and extinct since 1627, is the ancestor of domestic cattle?

The aurochs stood up to 1.8 metres at the shoulder, with horns 80 centimetres long. Herders still tamed it twice: once in the Near East and once in India, where it gave rise to humped zebu.

Which Neolithic founder crop, sown beside the first wheat and barley, was raised for its oil and fibre rather than food?

Flax fibres are spun into linen, and people were twisting wild ones into thread 30,000 years ago. Genetic evidence suggests farmers first selected the plant for its oil.

Which culture of the Levant settled in lasting villages and reaped wild cereals before farming had been invented?

Natufian people were unusual in staying put while still living on wild food. A cave they used near Haifa holds residue of what may be beer brewed 13,000 years ago.

In which modern country is Mehrgarh, a Neolithic farming village where molar teeth were drilled up to 9,000 years ago?

Pakistan's Mehrgarh, on the Kacchi Plain of Balochistan, is among South Asia's earliest farming sites. Eleven molars from its graveyard were drilled while their owners were alive, an early form of dentistry.

The Linear Pottery culture, early farmers of central Europe, built which dwellings, the largest buildings of their day?

Longhouses of the Linear Pottery culture could run 45 metres from end to end. They stood in villages of five to eight, spaced about 20 metres apart.

In which country did Jōmon hunter-gatherers make some of the world's oldest pottery, long before they farmed?

Japan's Jōmon potters upset the old idea that clay pots arrive only with farming. Their name means cord-marked, after the patterns pressed into the wet clay.

Charred remains at a 14,400-year-old hearth in Jordan show that foragers made which food long before farming began?

Bread from that hearth, at a site called Shubayqa 1, is the oldest known anywhere. It was baked about 4,000 years before agriculture emerged in southwest Asia.

Which harvesting tool, made by setting flint blades in a wooden handle, picks up a gloss from cutting cereal stems?

Sickle blades first turn up among Levantine foragers who were cutting wild cereals before anyone farmed. The earliest were straight and worked with a sawing motion.

What did Neolithic harvests create that freed some villagers to become full-time potters, weavers, priests and rulers?

A food surplus meant not everyone had to work the land. Villages built granaries to keep the extra seed and grain, and specialised workers and better tools followed.

Which river joins the Tigris in enclosing Mesopotamia, where silt-rich fields fed the world's first cities?

The Euphrates and its twin both rise in the highlands of eastern Turkey. Mesopotamia is Greek for the land between rivers.

Which civilization of southern Mesopotamia, the earliest known, grew out of farming villages in what is now Iraq?

Sumer emerged between the 5th and 4th millennium BC, thousands of years after the first farms. Its scribes went on to press wedge-shaped cuneiform writing into clay tablets.

Which Arabic-derived word names the mounds left where generations of Near Eastern villagers rebuilt on the same spot?

Tell is one of the most common prefixes in Palestinian place names. A big one holds the stacked debris of settlement after settlement, collapsed mudbricks and all.

Neolithic villagers at Jiahu in China carved which playable instruments from the wing bones of red-crowned cranes?

Flutes from Jiahu, 33 pieces in all, are believed to be among the oldest playable musical instruments in the world. Some were placed in graves as offerings.

Neolithic villagers in the Levant kept ancestors' skulls beneath their homes, the faces rebuilt in which material?

Plaster faces modelled over real skulls are some of the oldest art in the Middle East. Examples have been excavated in Jordan and Syria as well as the West Bank.

Ancient DNA shows Europe's first farmers were migrants from which region, not local foragers who learned to farm?

Anatolia's farmers moved into southeast Europe from around 7000 BC and gradually spread north and west. Their descendants later crossed from Iberia into northwest Africa.

Which cold snap ending the last glacial period, named after a tundra wildflower, is often linked to farming's origins?

The Younger Dryas lasted from about 12,900 to 11,700 years ago. Fossils of its namesake, the cold-loving flower Dryas octopetala, are abundant in European sediments from that time.

Which farmyard bird is the domesticated form of the red junglefowl, a wild bird native to Southeast Asia?

The chicken still interbreeds freely with wild red junglefowl. Junglefowl can fly, but a domestic chicken is too heavy to manage more than a short distance.

Which archaeologist proposed the Hilly Flanks hypothesis, placing farming's birth in the Taurus and Zagros foothills?

Robert Braidwood argued that the uplands, not shrinking desert oases, held the wild plants and animals worth taming. He launched the Jarmo Project in Iraq in 1947 to look for the evidence.