Prehistoric Men

by Robert J. Braidwood

THE First Revolution

As the incipient era of cultivation and animal domestication passed onward into the era of the primary village-farming community, the first basic change in human economy was fully achieved. In southwestern Asia, this seems to have taken place about nine thousand years ago. I am going to restrict my description to this earliest Near Eastern case—I do not know enough about the later comparable experiments in the Far East and in the New World. Let us first, once again, think of the contrast between food-collecting and food-producing as ways of life.