Could the Neolithic Revolution have happened before the end of the Pleistocene Ice Ages?
why not? But realistically probably not. The end of the ice age was probably followed by a large increase in the food supply, survivability, and general quality of life. But your question is vague so to be safe I’ll just say that if it could have, it would have, but it didn’t, so it couldn’t have.
But the Pleistocene was filled with many prolonged interglacials before the current Holocene Epoch began (in reality only the most current of a series of similar interglacial periods that break up the Pleistocene), the food supply and survivability of humanity also increased greatly during this period, but no agriculture was developed.
Why not? It seems as though cultivation of plants started very soon after the end of the glacial period, at least in Mesopotamia, so the neolithic revolution did not need very long to first appear after the end of the last ice age, and there were many areas of the world during the Pleistocene that glaciars never touched. Indeed, the whole Sahara was once highly fertile.
So, did the end of the Pleistocene truly signal such a profound shift in the nature of humanity?
Sorry myles I don’t think that I can even try to answer that. There are no good conclusions on why agriculture started. The most difficult point of the beginning of agriculture was the fact that at its earliest there are signs that the people who practiced it actually suffered from poorer nutrition than people in the same area that didn’t practice agriculture. You can imagine how difficult it must be to figure out why people did something that had no apparent benefit. As for the connection between the end of the ice age and the beginning of agriculture, that’s spurious when there isn’t a direction knowledge of why agriculture started.
Thanks Insufferable!
I have read a bit about early agriculturalists, although I am obviously no expert.
I guess what I was thinking about was I was trying to come up with a alternate-history imaginary world in which the pleistocene ice ages had not ended, and I was trying to think of how civilization might have possibly developed in that scenario. This is for a science fiction story that I am working on…
Obviously, any theories or hypotheses would be highly speculative at best.
However, to clear up some loose ends:
There are health problems associated with the early Neolithic, i.e. a drop in height (indicating poorer nutrition due to less animal protein), more stress due to hard work, and problems like bad teeth.
This raises the question you left off with, why did agriculturalists succeed?
populations were radically transformed.
For example, typical hunter-gatherer nomads have a birth spacing of 1 to every 2-2.5 years, minimum, and often considerably more, because a woman on average can carry only one nursing infant.
Therefore, hunter-gatherer populations rarely have a birth-rate over 30-35 per 1000.
The only societies which reproduce at the biological maximum are subsistence-peasant agriculturalists.
dense sedentary populations living with domesticated animals in close proximity could support more diseases.
the density of the population allows the community to sustain the monster killing fevers as endemic, childhood diseases, that allow the agriculturalists to survive but exterminate less densely populated groups, and give hunter-gatherers no chance for immunity.
Hunter-gatherers were not only less numerous than farmers, but tended to die off when they came in contact because of the differences in the disease environment.
This is similar to what happened demographically to the Americas after 1492, although probably more gradual. See Crosby’s Ecological Imperialism.
It’s a little off topic but if you want an interesting interpretation of pre-agrarian life try the link above.
Hey, have you written anything I’d know?
Thanks for the link.
Sorry, no. I haven’t had anything published.
I’m still an undergrad in college trying to get a degree in history.
However, writing science fiction/alternate history stories is a part-time hobby of mine. None are polished enough to publish yet, though.
Another theory I have heard brandied about is that the reason people settled in one place was not so much as to grow food, but instead they used the grain in making beer. The bread came later. Said theory tend to come up when drink though, so take it with a grain of salt. Still, it would be fine for a sci-fi story.
But the ice ages haven’t ended, even if the Pleistocene has;
we are in an interglacial period, no different in quality to the other interglacial periods which occured during the Pleistocene era.
The name for our current era ‘Holocene’ refers to the fossil record, which is quite different in this period to previous interglacials;
and this might be connected to the Neolithic revolution, although exactly how I am not sure.
SF worldbuilding at
http://www.orionsarm.com/main.html