The Neolithic Revolution

There was a time when, once the day's catch ran out, nobody knew where to go the next day. The people of the Paleolithic era staked their whole lives on nuts in the forest and the tracks of passing animals. Each day was one more anxious journey.

Then they began to notice how nature works: a seed falls into the soil, a new sprout comes up, and rich ears of grain form again. They moved away from a passive life that depended only on nature's gifts. People plowed fields and sowed seeds, and became producers who made the food they needed themselves. Herding, which means keeping wild animals in pens and taming them, took its first steps at the same time.

As farming and herding took hold, people built sturdy pit houses near rivers, where water was easy to find, and stayed for long periods. In places with plenty of food, like West Asia, settled villages sometimes appeared even before farming did. So settling down and farming developed together, each shaping the other. People left temporary shelters like tents behind and built homes of their own. Real settled life began, and the first villages in human history appeared one after another.

Once people farmed and raised animals themselves, something amazing appeared that had never been seen before. There was "surplus food" (surplus production): food left over after eating today, which could be stored for tomorrow. Pottery, shaped from clay and fired, was widely used to protect grain from mice and insects and to boil food. But in some places, like East Asia, pottery appeared before farming. In others, like West Asia, farming began before pottery. Polished stone tools, stones ground smooth, were another typical tool of this era.

With full granaries, the whole village no longer had to work the fields from dawn to night. Thanks to the surplus, some people made sturdier pots and farm tools, and others built houses or dug water channels. Jobs split apart as each person put a special skill to use.

But once there was extra wealth, quarrels and greed over getting more of it also began to bloom. As time passed, the gap between rich and poor widened. Powerful people who made the village's important decisions appeared, and the community slowly turned into a society divided into ranks and classes. This change took a very long time. In Korean history, the time when classes became clear is usually placed in the Bronze Age.

The word "revolution" makes it easy to imagine that one morning everyone in the world turned into a farmer, as if by magic. But the Neolithic Revolution was a huge process of adaptation. It unfolded slowly over thousands of years, in many parts of the world, fitted to each local environment.

To be more precise, many studies suggest that the first farmers had harder lives than hunter-gatherers. Hunters ate a wide variety of fruits and meat. Early farmers had to rely on just a few kinds of grain, and when climate changes like drought or flood struck, a whole village could fall into serious crisis. Plowing fields and pulling weeds also made the working day much longer than before.

Still, farming could feed far more people on a smaller piece of land than hunting could. An individual's days may have been sweatier and harder, but thanks to the power of an explosively growing population, farming societies overtook hunting groups and rose to become the clear mainstream of human history.