Life Before The Neolithic Revolution

Before the Neolithic Revolution more than 10,000 years ago, humans lived as hunter-gatherers. Hunting game and wild animals, gathering berries, roots, and plants to survive the days. Then came a transition that would change forever the way humans live, eat, and survive: farming and agriculture. This may likely have been a welcome addition, at the time, to the food supply for the growing population. Certainly, agriculture and farming have had their rewards that perhaps humans would not be able to live without today. However, some results show there are many disadvantages too. Some would argue that when humans transitioned from searching and foraging for food to cultivating and growing food this “may have been the worst mistake in the history of the human race.”

The transition into the agricultural revolution brought with it many benefits. Benefits including a much more effective and resourceful way to produce more food for the masses, without the extraordinary effort it must have taken to be a hunter and go out to find enough food for one’s family each day. The ability to produce an abundant food supply and avoid starvation came with this transition. Were the lives of these and future humans really improves and made healthier, or was a better quality of life reached through this revolutionary transition from daily hunting and gathering to agriculture and farming? Some progressivist's perspectives suggest of course our ancestors adopted agriculture because it is an “efficient way to get more food for less work.”[footnoteRef:2] [2: Diamond, p.81.]

This efficient way to cultivate mass food production would also prove to be detrimental to future human societies, the likes of which would not be discovered until after paleopathologists were able to study skeletons from Greece and Turkey. After these studies, it was revealed the hunter-gatherers had a typical height for a man to be 5’9” and 5’3” for women. After agriculture was adopted and by 3000 B.C., a woman’s height was 5’ and a man’s average height had fallen to 5’3”. A stunning drop indeed. Modern-day Turks and Greeks still have not regained the previous heights of their ancestors. The life expectancy of pre-agriculture also dropped from around twenty-six years to nineteen. This agricultural revolution also brought with it crowded societies and the domestication of animals which in turn would bring parasites and disease.

These pathogens that had once been limited to animals were now transferring “through long and complex evolutionary processes to humans: animal diseases leaped the species gap and mutated into human ones.”[footnoteRef:3] During the Neolithic age farm animals like cows, pigs, and ducks contributed to diseases like smallpox, tuberculosis, and measles. Not to mention, human’s susceptibility to polluted water would cause the spread of horrible diseases like cholera, polio, and typhoid brought on by animals carrying these diseases. Settlement along rivers for agriculture and irrigation would be the source of these illnesses, parasites, and much death. Hookworm, roundworm, and other grotesque maladies would plague the inhabitants of these societies. As agriculture grew, the dependence on starchy, low nutrition, few crops would cause a decline in the health of these populations. Massive cattle herds would begin to cause deadly bacteria and pathogens to spread. 

Many animal-based ailments would be the reason these diseases like “diphtheria, influenza, chickenpox, mumps, and so forth- also had devastating impacts on packed populations which as yet had no immunity.”[footnoteRef:4] However, with all the negative that may have come with the Neolithic revolution, was there any positive? Some would argue it led to the first complex civilizations: Mesopotamia and Egypt. [4: Porter, p.7]

These two early civilizations would confirm the negative consequences of the Neolithic Revolution, but also found ways to mitigate the complications and problems that came with this transformation. Along the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in Mesopotamia, and along the Nile River in ancient Egyptian times. As the expanding of these two awesome empires increased so as the population.

These first civilizations came to formation because of the settlements that grew along the rivers that were used for irrigation and growing crops which in turn caused the population to rise, created communities, city-states, rulers, and progressed systems of writings. These first societies' structured writings served to reinforce the powers of rulers of authority. “Writing set apart the powerful from the powerless.”[footnoteRef:5] Sumerian peoples of Mesopotamia believed their rulers “governed in the name of some divine or heavenly authority or were themselves perceived as gods.”[footnoteRef:6] Each city-state worshipped its own gods, goddesses many of whom were part human. As opposed to the Egyptians, that looked to the pharaohs for answers to life and the afterlife’s questions. In Mesopotamia, even though there was a belief in an afterlife, it was not a utopian afterlife simply a dark existence ‘below our world’. So, finding answers to life and death was manufactured in the mythical The Epic of Gilgamesh. 

Gilgamesh, a Sumerian hero and great fighter, part god part human, arrogant and king to his people, but abusive to his people. Upon Gilgamesh’s quest for immortality and the death of his friend Enkidu, he comes across the goddess of the underworld Ereshkigal as she explains to Gilgamesh, “You will never find that life for which you are looking”.[footnoteRef:7] The underworld goddess enlightens him and tells him he can find his happiness in filling his belly, dancing, in a child’s little hand, and making his wife happy. In other words: it’s the little things that matter in life. 

Ancient Egypt’s cultural beliefs were considerably different from Mesopotamia. Egyptians believed upon the god-king’s death they would come upon the sun god Re crossing the heavens as he did each day and would be on their voyage to eternal life. Priests of Egypt, however, taught that “blissful immortality was the exclusive preserve of the divine king.”[footnoteRef:8] Essentially, only queens and royal family members would reach the afterlife, at least during the era of the Old Kingdom. As Egyptian times moved into what would become the Middle Kingdom (ca. 2060-1700), and as injustices of society were more prevalent, if the deceased’s family was able to pay for a funeral, they too could be afforded eternal life. Finally, by the New Kingdom, and The Mortuary Text of The Negative Confession, “reaching the Hall of the Two Truths to purge N (deceased name) of any sins committed and to see the face of every god.”[footnoteRef:9] With a list of all things the departed shall not have done, and speaking to “the Great God” Osiris, “the person’s heart will then be placed on a scale to be balanced against a feather as proof of that purity and worthiness for eternal life.”[footnoteRef:10] The deceased will be devoured if not.