Human history is full of interesting facts, which are studied by archaeologists. One of these is the transition from Neolithic rural life to more formalized urban settlements. One sign of this transition was agricultural innovation and the diversification of agricultural products. It was along with the increase of resources and the improvement of tools and methods of labor that the first urban settlements began to appear. Initially, these were semi-permanent or seasonal camps to which people returned more and more frequently, such as Star-Carr in Britain, dating from around the 9th millennium B.C. However, over time, the world’s first permanent settlements appeared during this period. An early example of this can be found at the Natufian Ain Mallah in the Levant, dating from about 12500 BC (Marciniak, 2018). People lived there permanently, relying on gazelle hunting along with the cultivation of wild wheat and barley.
In history, crises have often served as catalysts for underlying processes of change. Such crises could be internal or external. Before the innovations of agriculture in the Middle East, the world became much colder, leading to a return to the glacial conditions known as the Late Dryas. As the migration of herds and the growth of wild grasses became upset, the conventional way of life became no longer possible for many people. Some would indeed have died, and many would have had to return to a more mobile way of life. Nevertheless, the last changes that had gradually accumulated over the millennia were not lost. When people left declining settlements, they took their grains with them and sowed them in entirely new places. The creation of new crops and the greater emphasis of some communities on growing grains with flint sickles accelerated the process of natural and artificial selection. It eventually led to the emergence of fully cultivated wheat and, with it, the means of overcoming the limitations of the old hunter-gatherer settlements.
This process can be traced back to Abu Hureyra, in what is now Syria, where people responded to global cooling by intensive cultivation of wild rye. It was there that the oldest domesticated cereal crops were found, dating from about 10500 B.C (Marciniak, 2018). From about 9500 B.C., people in the Levant and Southeastern Turkey returned to sedentary life, but this time at a qualitatively higher level, based on domesticated cereals and domesticated animals such as sheep and goats, which were also transformed by the conscious intervention of human hunters who turned into herders. By about the 8th millennium B.C., this new way of life had spread throughout the Middle East and soon began to spread into Europe and South Asia (Marciniak, 2018). Sedentary agriculture also independently emerged elsewhere, including in China, parts of Africa, and the Americas.
Thus, agricultural innovations were, for the most part, provoked by changes in the environment of the people of the time. These changes spurred the expansion of the agricultural industry and changes in the means by which farming was wielded. In turn, the expansion of the agrarian sphere was one of the critical factors symbolizing the transition from entirely rural to urban settlements. Subsequently, the diversification of the agricultural industry and the means of cultivating the land would open the way for primitive people to enter the world of great industry. Thus, it becomes clear that the progress of the agricultural field of human activity will mark the progress of all other fields.
Reference
Marciniak, A. (2018). Placing animals in the Neolithic: Social zooarchaeology of prehistoric farming communities. Routledge. Web.