The Neolithic Revolution

Hunter-gatherers got to know the seasons and their food sources really well. Slowly, instead of only finding food, people began to produce it. This change is called the Neolithic Revolution.

The heart of it was domestication: bringing chosen plants and animals under human control, and breeding new kinds through cultivation (growing crops) and husbandry (raising animals). A wild grass became a crop; a wild goat became a farm goat.

What changed?

These villages laid the foundation for the next big change, the urban revolution: towns and cities.

"Did everyone start farming at the same time?" No. Fig. 4.14 shows it happened at different times in different places:

• West Asia: wheat and barley;
• India and North China: millets;
• India's Ganga plains and South China (the Yangtze): rice;
• West Africa: pearl millet.

People kept cattle, sheep, goats and pigs, and lived in houses of mud brick or thatch, some on stilts.

In India: Mehrgarh. On the Bolan River, in present-day Pakistan, Mehrgarh is the oldest Neolithic site in the subcontinent and the earliest farming village, going back to about 7000 BCE. Its people:

• built houses and granaries (grain stores) of handmade, sun-dried bricks;
• buried their dead in graves;
• made ornaments of lapis lazuli, carnelian and shells;
• grew wheat and barley;
• kept sheep, goats and Indian cattle, especially the humped zebu bull.

Mehrgarh's people were also the first to make copper objects, so by about 4000 BCE they had become Chalcolithic (copper-and-stone) people. That laid the base for the Bronze Age Sindhu–Sarasvatī civilisation around 3500 BCE.

Farming spread across the land. By 2500 BCE, Neolithic farming communities lived across most of the subcontinent. They herded cattle, sheep and goats and grew cereals, millets and pulses. One such site is Sanganakallu in Karnataka, on top of a granite hill, from about 2000 BCE.

"Why call it a revolution, when it took thousands of years?" Because of how deep the change was, not how fast. Food, homes, tools, the number of people and the way society worked all changed.