534 



THE CHANGING GENERATIONS 



herding were discovered by certain people of the Mediterranean race. 

 This apparently occurred in the hilly flanks of the region called the 

 "Fertile Crescent" that extends from Egypt to Iran. How it happened is 

 unknown, though it is plausibly supposed that with increasing aridity 

 in postglacial times men began to seek new plant foods to replace the 

 vanishing game. From collecting the heads of wild wheat and barley they 

 came to grow these grasses nearer home, and eventually to cultivate them 

 as crops. Driven by scarcity of natural pasture, wild cattle, pigs, sheep 



and goats may have come to feed in the stubble 

 fields, where they might be first tolerated as easy 

 game, later protected and fed as a reserve food 

 supply, continually selected for tameness, and 

 ultimately completely domesticated. 



This is guesswork, of course, but probably 

 pretty accurate guessing, for by about 5000 B.C. 

 the people of this region had become farmers and 

 herdsmen, living in small villages scattered from 

 the Nile valley to northern Iran. The grain was 

 cultivated with stone hoes, harvested with flint- 

 edged sickles, stored in bins and pits, pounded in 

 mortars to remove the chaff, and ground into meal 

 on querns. Most villages had cattle, sheep, and 

 goats, and some had pigs. Hunting and fishing 

 were still important sources of food. Chipped flint 

 tools continued in use from Paleolithic times, 

 but axes and hoes were made of hard dense stone 

 ground and polished. The ground stone ax, or celt, 

 was to the older archeologists the distinguishing 

 sign of the Neolithic or New Stone Age. By 

 5000 b.c. pottery made from baked clay was in 

 general use, and cloth was being woven along the 

 margins of the "Crescent." 

 The new abundance of food brought an immediate increase in popula- 

 tion. Villages multiplied in the rich river valleys, and agriculture spread 

 into the uplands. The Neolithic economy expanded rapidly into Greece, 

 southern Russia, and along the Danube valley into Europe. It also fol- 

 lowed the shores of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic Coast to Britain 

 and the Baltic area, showing that coastal trade in small boats had begun. 

 In England Neolithic cultures were replacing Paleolithic ones by 3000 

 b.c, and in the Baltic 500 years later. 



Although food production was first discovered in the Near and the 

 Middle East, it was developed independently in various other parts of the 

 world. A series of separate cultures at the Neolithic level thus came into 



Fig. 31.20. A Neolithic 

 celt, or polished stone 

 ax, from the Swiss lake 

 villages. The stone head 

 was set in an antler base 

 dressed to fit into a slot 

 in a wooden helve. 



