The Agricultural Revolution or Neolithic Revolution was a massive transition of various different human cultures during the Neolithic era from a life of hunting and gathering to one of settlement and agriculture, making an increasingly large population possible.
It started around 12,000 B.CE. in the Fertile Crescent, a boomerang-shaped section of the Middle East where humans first took up farming. Shortly after, Stone Age, humans from India and China also started practicing agriculture. Civilizations and towns grew out of the innovations of the finest Neolithic Revolution.
The Neolithic Revolution is associated with the rise of agriculture, technology, and settlements. It also contributed to the development of writing and other forms of public communication.
People in the Neolithic Age were highly reliant on their environment, including plant foods and animal products. Because of the changes brought about by these factors, communities experienced a profound shift in their values and ways of living. This marked the beginning of the rise of civilization, which came to dominate the Earth through various advancements. In this period, agriculture developed and became the driving force behind development.
The Neolithic Revolution marked the beginning of the Neolithic Age, and it marked the arrival of the Indus Valley Civilization. The latter’s rise to power was facilitated by the use of metals and their association with agricultural progress. Between the years 3000 B.C. and 1200 B.C., the agricultural revolution took place in the form of wheat production. With the development of agriculture, civilizations on many different continents experienced periods of expansion and darkness. These were the precursors to the great classical civilizations that occurred later in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome.
The earliest Neolithic sites in South Asia are Bhirrana in Haryana dated to 7570–6200 BCE, and Mehrgarh, dated to between 6500 BCE and 5500 BCE, in the Kachi plain of Ancient India; the site has archaeological evidence of farming (barley and wheat) and herding (sheep, cattle, and goats).
So here is the question! Why did hunter-gatherers first begin farming?
There are actually a couple of different reasons for the same.
One is that in times of abundance, humans had the leisure to begin the domestication of plants experimentation. The other theory proposes that in lean times – thanks to over-exploitation of resources, population growth, a changing climate– domestication was a way to enhance diets and feed everyone.
The early humans were Hunter-gatherers, who had traveled to the region in search of food, began to gather wild grains they encountered growing there. They scattered spare grains on the ground, and they saw different new crops growing due to the seeds. This experiment of humans spreading random seeds in an empty land gave rise to different flourishing crops, and the era of agriculture began.
