Around 10,000 BC, in Eurasia, the ice of the last Ice Age gradually began to withdraw toward the North Pole and to the higher regions of the Alps and the great Asian mountain chains. Although it would take another few thousand years for the icecaps to reach the size they had in the 20th century AD, the process of a gradual warming of the climate paved the way for important changes. Slowly the sea level rose, so that between 10,000 and 5,000 BC, England and the continent of Europe, and Denmark and Sweden, to mention just a few examples, became separated from each other. Behind the retreating ice, the zones of vegetation moved up to the north. In the Mediterranean regions and especially in the Near East, the typically Mediterranean climate settled in after around 10,000 BC, a climate with warm and dry summers and with the rainfall mainly limited to the cooler winter periods, although the contrast between summer and winter temperatures in the period between roughly 10,000 and 4,000 BC was much sharper than it is today. Under the regime of extreme changes in temperature between the seasons, with a pronounced and long dry period in the summer months, there developed a great variety of plants that would not survive longer than one year. Various sorts of eatable grasses, in particular a primitive variety of wheat, belonged to these species of vegetation. Since the natural occurrence of such crops was the necessary condition for the transition to agriculture, the Near East provided the environment required for a change in human culture that was to have far-reaching consequences.
For the first time, this change took place in the Near East, and for the next few thousand years, all innovations in the vast western half of Eurasia would arise mainly in this region and find their way from here to the Mediterranean and Europe. The explanation for the primacy of the Near East can be found in the special development of this region after the
Figure 5 Worm eggs from the intestines of the Lindow Man, a British bog body. Microscopic images of two worm eggs, enlarged x1000, from the intestines of the Lindow Man, a bog body found in 1984 in Lindow Moss in Cheshire, England. The body dates from the Late Bronze Age or the Iron Age—conflicting C14 dates for the body and the surrounding peat make it impossible to more precise. The worm egg on the left is Ascaris lumbricoides, and that on the right is Trichuris trichuria. Both are common intestinal parasites, but in Europe between the Iron Age and the Early Middle Ages worm infections are supposed to have been quite general and extremely severe. Human infection with Ascaris lumbricoides is thought to have resulted from the domestication of the pig. Photos: York University
End of the last Ice Age. It was here that groups of hunter-gatherers for the first time took up a partially sedentary way of life that made the discovery of edible grasses possible. At first, these were merely gathered, but the next step was cultivation: it was discovered that the grains could be sown, so that after some time at the same spot a larger amount of these could be gathered or harvested. To this must have been added fairly early the experience that by selecting and sowing certain varieties the quality of the harvest could be enhanced. With this, agriculture proper was born. This step was taken, possibly at a number of places during roughly the same time period, that is, the period between around 10,000 to 8,000 BC, in the hilly stretch of lands of the so-called Fertile Crescent that runs from modern-day Israel across Lebanon, Syria, and northern Iraq into Iran. It is not clear, however, whether the pressure of an increased population forced the first experiments with an additional food source, or that the addition of grains to the existing food source began as a “luxury” that developed into a necessity when the population had as a consequence increased. With this, a far-reaching cultural and economic change, the Neolithic or New Stone Age, began. Originally, this era in prehistory had received its name from a new phase in the working of stone instruments, characterized by polished instead of unpolished stone utensils, but the real criterion for the beginning of the Neolithic is the domestication of certain plants and the transition to a sedentary way of life.
Almost contemporaneously with the appearance of the first agrarian settlements, as we have seen, the process of domestication of some animal species began. Presumably, already in the Late Paleolithic, dogs had become the companions of the human hunters. Hunter-gatherers already manipulated nature to some extent: for example, they mostly spared the females and the young of their prey in order to ensure a steady supply of the animals in a certain area, or they tried to lure their prey by felling trees in order to produce forest clearings attractive to big game. The Neolithic way of life, however, opened up the possibility of a human-enforced adaptation of certain animal species to living in close proximity with and dependence on humans. By crossbreeding animals with the qualities desired and by thorough-breeding on these qualities, Neolithic farmers created the first domestic animals. Exact dates are hard to give, but probably somewhere between 10,000 and 5,000 BC in the Near East, successively sheep and goats, pigs and cattle became domesticated. In the late fourth millennium BC, somewhere in the steppes of southern Russia or Central Asia, the horse would be added to these, initially only for the consumption of its meat.
The introduction of animal breeding meant a significant extension of the economic base of Neolithic life because of the provision of meat, wool, hide, and milk, and the use of cows and later of horses as draft animals and pack animals. As a result, Neolithic groups of people acquired important advantages over the rest of the human species, also in a demographic sense, for the breeding of small and large animals contributed to the food supply and hence to the overall growth in population of these groups. At the same time, the transition to agriculture and herding was accompanied by the spread of new diseases caused by microparasites to which humans as hunters had not been exposed to such an extent before. In all probability, the Neolithic transition must initially even have weakened the population groups involved, but in the long run it must have given them, in contrast with the groups of hunters outside their territory, a certain immunity against many of these diseases. Moreover, the higher density of population in an agricultural society caused certain diseases to become endemic in that population. In the gradual extension of the areas of Neolithic culture, therefore, diseases must have played their role, however hard it is for us to qualify, let alone to quantify that role. That extension must have been the result of various contributing factors: population growth, erosion of the soil used for agriculture forcing people to move to other grounds within a few years, and probably also the adoption of the Neolithic way of life by peripheral human groups. Often, however, contacts between Neolithic people and groups still living in a Paleolithic hunting culture must have been fatal for the latter: not only numerically but also physically, they more often than not must have succumbed to the carriers of both a new culture and new diseases.
World History
