Agriculture—Test of the Neolithic
The second fact is that agriculture seems to be the only sound test of the Neolithic. Pottery and weaving preceded agriculture, yet, without agriculture and its fixed communities and its leisure, pottery and weaving could not have reached perfection. As for the polished ax, it was handy enough in in-fighting; but it was of no practical social use until the farmer needed to cut down the trees which began to thrive all over the place when the glaciers disappeared. The Badarians of Egypt were farmers, yet they made no polished axes because there was almost no timber to cut.[21]
Speech was certainly the first great inventive triumph of primitive man. The making of fire ranks second. The third great invention, agriculture, was also the first industrial revolution; without it what we carelessly assume to be the industrial revolution would have been impossible.
Science feels sure that agriculture appeared in the Old World before it did in the New, but is not so certain as to where man first tilled the soil and when. James H. Breasted, Sr., put agriculture back to 18,000 B.C.; later writers push it up to 5000 B.C. There has been quite as much disagreement about the area where agriculture began. At first the valley of the Nile seemed to be the right spot, for every fall the flood waters of the river brought not only automatic irrigation but also fresh, fertile soil to enrich the depleted farm lands. Soon, however, the birthplace of agriculture moved to the “fertile crescent” that stretched from Egypt to Mesopotamia. Later it shifted from the Tigris-Euphrates valley to the valley of the Indus. Now it seems to lie somewhere between these two, perhaps in the dry highlands of Iran and Iraq. In northern Iraq, 400 miles north of Ur, the wild ancestors of certain of our cultivated grains still grow, and excavators have come on evidences of farming communities which may be 8,000 to 11,000 years old.[22] There has always been hot argument between the supporters of denuded river valleys and the supporters of dry uplands as the natural site of early agriculture. Lately students have begun to argue for forested or jungle areas, and above all for mountain valleys; and they have plumped for tubers and melons, rather than grains, as the first crops cultivated by early man. These students see man as a gardener before he was a farmer.
Only the beginnings of agriculture are of any importance in a discussion of early man. Early man may invent agriculture, but thereupon he promptly ceases to be early man. With the food, leisure, and fixed abode that farming provides, he is soon inventing writing. He is then no longer even prehistoric.