The Neolithic Revolution
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40 free The Neolithic Revolution trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
For most of human existence, people lived by hunting and gathering, moving camp with the seasons. Then, beginning roughly twelve thousand years ago, communities in several parts of the world independently started planting crops and keeping animals. Archaeologists call that shift the Neolithic Revolution, and almost everything about modern life, from towns and trade to kings and taxes, grows out of it. This quiz covers the whole story: where farming began and how it spread, the wild plants and animals that became crops and livestock, the earliest villages and great stone monuments, the tools and crafts of the late Stone Age, and the surprising costs that came with a settled life. It also meets the scholars who named and explained the change. It is written for students reviewing a world history unit, teachers who want a ready-made classroom quiz, and anyone curious about how foragers became farmers. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so the quiz works as a review as well as a game.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which region between the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf is believed to be where settled farming first emerged?
Fertile Crescent
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.
Q 02Which animal did hunter-gatherers domesticate during the last Ice Age, thousands of years before the first farm animals?
Dog
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.
Q 03Which crop, bred in southern Mexico from the wild grass teosinte, is grown with beans and squash as the Three Sisters?
Maize
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.
Q 04Skeletons show that early farmers, compared with the hunter-gatherers who came before them, were on average what?
Shorter
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.
Q 05A gene variant that spread after the Neolithic Revolution lets many adults digest which food?
Milk
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.
Q 06Which animal, drawn to the rodents in early farmers' grain stores, was buried beside a human on Cyprus 9,500 years ago?
Cat
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.
Q 07Which Middle Eastern town, called the world's oldest fortified city, had a stone wall and tower by about 8000 BCE?
Jericho
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.
Q 08Which monument, raised by Britain's Neolithic farmers, includes bluestones hauled from the Preseli Hills in Wales?
Stonehenge
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.
Q 09Which pack animal did Andean peoples breed from the wild guanaco, a slender relative of the camel?
Llama
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.
Q 10The word Neolithic, coined by the Victorian banker John Lubbock, joins two Greek words that together mean what?
New stone
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.
Q 11Which Australian archaeologist coined the term Neolithic Revolution, describing it in his book Man Makes Himself?
V. Gordon Childe
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.
Q 12Which Neolithic settlement in Turkey had no streets, so people crossed the rooftops and entered their homes by ladder?
Çatalhöyük
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.
Q 13Which hilltop site in Turkey has carved T-shaped stone pillars raised by hunter-gatherers more than 11,000 years ago?
Göbekli Tepe
Q 21Which author argued in Guns, Germs, and Steel that Eurasia's east–west axis let crops and livestock spread quickly?
Jared Diamond
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.
Q 22Farming began early in which geological epoch, the warm period that started about 11,700 years ago and continues today?
Holocene
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.
Q 23Which huge wild ox, painted on Ice Age cave walls and extinct since 1627, is the ancestor of domestic cattle?
Aurochs
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.
Q 14Which Scottish island group holds Skara Brae, a Neolithic village whose houses still contain stone beds and dressers?
Orkney
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.
Q 15Newgrange, a passage tomb raised in Neolithic Ireland, is aligned so sunrise floods its chamber on which occasion?
Winter solstice
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.
Q 16On which Pacific island did highlanders at Kuk Swamp dig drainage ditches and invent farming for themselves?
New Guinea
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.
Q 17Which staple crop was first domesticated around Lake Titicaca, in the high Andes of Peru and Bolivia?
Potato
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.
Q 18Which cereal did Neolithic villagers along China's Yangtze River domesticate about 9,000 years ago?
Rice
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.
Q 19Which small rodent, now a popular children's pet, was first domesticated in the Andes as a source of meat?
Guinea pig
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.
Q 20Which stone from volcanoes in central Turkey did Neolithic villagers trade widely, prizing its razor-sharp edge?
Obsidian
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.
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.
Q 24Which Neolithic founder crop, sown beside the first wheat and barley, was raised for its oil and fibre rather than food?
Flax
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.
Q 25Which culture of the Levant settled in lasting villages and reaped wild cereals before farming had been invented?
Natufian
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.
Q 26In which modern country is Mehrgarh, a Neolithic farming village where molar teeth were drilled up to 9,000 years ago?
Pakistan
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.
Q 27The Linear Pottery culture, early farmers of central Europe, built which dwellings, the largest buildings of their day?
Longhouses
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.
Q 28In which country did Jōmon hunter-gatherers make some of the world's oldest pottery, long before they farmed?
Japan
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.
Q 29Charred remains at a 14,400-year-old hearth in Jordan show that foragers made which food long before farming began?
Bread
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.
Q 30Which harvesting tool, made by setting flint blades in a wooden handle, picks up a gloss from cutting cereal stems?
Sickle
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.