The spread of Neolithic culture from its origins in the Near East was a gradual and steady process. Initially, in the 10th and 9th millennia BC, agriculture was restricted to the Fertile Crescent stretching from Israel into Iran, although it cannot be excluded that already in this period much farther to the east in various places an independent development toward agriculture had taken off. For the rest, however, in vast areas the Paleolithic lived on. In the course of the 7th millennium BC, the agricultural way of life spread via Anatolia (modern-day Turkey) to Greece and the Balkans, and in the 6th millennium along the river valleys of the Danube and the Rhine further to Western Europe. By the 5th millennium BC, the whole of Europe south of the line Oslo-Stockholm had become acquainted with agriculture. The cold regions north and northeast of that line remained for a long time inhospitable areas where the ancestors of Laps, Finns, and various Siberian peoples maintained their Paleolithic hunter cultures relatively unscathed.
In another direction, Neolithic culture already in the 7th millennium BC spread to northern Africa, but here the gradual drying up of the climate and the formation of the Sahara desert presented a growing barrier. In tropical Africa, agriculture and cattle breeding presumably spread only slowly in a long process starting from Egypt south to eastern Africa and beyond. To the east, Neolithic culture reached Iran and the Indus valley. There, the first agricultural settlements arose in the 5th millennium BC, at the latest. Further to the east, in India and Southeast Asia, a possibly independent development began, in which the gathering of plants and various tropical fruits and crops lead to a semi-sedentary way of life and where in the 4th millennium BC, if not earlier, the transition to rice growing was made. From here, at a later stage, the growing of rice would spread to southern China. It is still not clear whether the cultivation of grain in the loess areas of northern China had been an autonomous development as well, or that it derived, ultimately, from the Neolithic heartland in the Near East. The beginnings of this culture are as yet insufficiently dated, but there are indications that here too an independent development took place that possibly was as old as the one in the Near East. In any case, the appearance of agricultural societies in the whole of Eurasia caused the areas of older, Paleolithic cultures to gradually shrink toward the Siberian north or to inaccessible jungle areas or isolated islands off the coasts of the continent.
World History
