The Neolithic Revolution is the invention of farming, an event whose significance can hardly be overstated. “The human career,” wrote the historian Ronald Wright, “divides in two: everything before the Neolithic Revolution and everything after it.” It began in the Middle East about eleven thousand years ago, in the western half of the Fertile Crescent, which arcs between southern Iraq and Israel, reaching into southern Turkey along the way. Foraging societies there grouped into permanent villages and learned to cultivate and breed the area’s wild wheat and barley. In the next few millennia the
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