A History of Humans in Paleolithic and the Neolithic Age and Its Revolution

What could we say that we know about people? For as long as people have existed in this world, they have lived organized in one kind of society or other; men and women have taken specific roles in their societies. As in every culture there have been rules and they have tried to enforce those rules. Each generation has shared its knowledge with the next, and they have adapted to their environment. whether it was by the way they dressed, how they lived or the kind of work they did.

For billions of years people lived in the Paleolithic age. Lets talk about humans then. Paleolithic people tended to live in small groups of twenty called bands and each band had a leader called the headman. The headman did not necessarily have the role of a dictator but more of a decision-maker in matters such as when it is time to move on or who gets the water and how much when there is a water shortage.

Men and women had their specific roles in the Old Stone Age. We call men the hunters and women the gatherers for obvious reasons. However, the majority of food consisted of roots and berries gathered by women. It was difficult to hunt because the weapons used were very primitive.

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The enforcement of rules in a small group like that was very flexible. People needed each other to survive and the ultimate punishment was to ostracize somebody. We could almost say that they lived like a family.

One of the main aspects of living in the Paleolithic age was how humans adapted to their environment and how the environment shaped them. People did not know any better way to survive than to follow their food source. They gathered and they hunted and when they depleted all their sources, they picked up and moved on. They did not have a lot of possessions either because they were always on the move.

For billions of years people lived like that. About ten thousand years ago, some hunter-gatherers began to stay at their temporary sites. They would note the patterns of the grains they gathered and learn about the habits of the animals they hunted. We can say that it was the start of farming. That takes us to the new period The Neolithic Age.

Some drastic changes happened to the human race. People found that planting their own crops and domesticating their own animals could provide them with more food than hunting and gathering.

They now knew how to make food available at all times without having to move every so often. They began to settle, build steadier houses and collect more personal belongings. They knew they were going to stay for a while.

The roles of men and women altered. Not everybody had to be doing the same thing any more. Men no longer had to hunt and so they would turn to pottery and craftwork and women would be farming. The leaders job probably changed the most; he can now be a full-time headman and for doing that he would get a certain percentage of the harvest. The advantage of farming is that they can produce surplus. We could also see the first signs of trade.

Enforcement of rules turned out to be stronger. Now that people had become stationary and collected more things, others that did not have as much would be tempted to take things that did not belong to them.

We are asking ourselves: What was so revolutionary about the Neolithic Revolution? Beginning of farming was the foundation of the first civilizations. Civilization is dependent upon agriculture. We could say that farming brought us the world that we know now. We all take certain roles, we do not all do the same thing but we must contribute somehow to bring the food to our tables one way or another; we have homes that we plan to stay in for a while, and there are definite signs of trade. We do not exactly have a headman but we have the government to lay the rules we should abide by. otherwise we get punished. The Neolithic revolution meant a major change for the world and the human race.

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