First Farmers (2)

The long Paleolithic era, and the first human process to operate on a global scale was the settlement of earth. Then about 12,000 years ago, a second global pattern began to unfold, agriculture. Known as the Neolithic or Agriculture Revolution, it refers to the cultivation of particular plants as well as taming and breeding particular animals. This replaced the gathering and hunting practices all over the world. Although it to happened over centuries and millennia ago, this Agriculture Revolution represented an all over transformation of human life and provided a foundation for everything that followed: growing populations, settled villages, animal diseases, cities, states, empires, civilizations, writting, literature and much more. Among the Agriculture Revolution, was a new relationship between humankind and other living things. Men and women were not only using what they found in earth but the also changed it. This was “domestication” the taming and changing of nature for the benefit of humankind.  The expansion of farming occurred in two ways, the first diffusion which is the gradual spread of agricultural techniques. The second process was the slow colonization or migration of agricultural peoples as growing populations and pressures to expand pushed them outward.