WHAT WAS SO REVOLUTIONARY ABOUT THE NEOLITHIC REVOLUTION?
What could we say that we know about people? For as long as people have existed in this world, they have lived organized in one kind of society or other; men and women have taken specific roles in their societies. As in every culture there have been rules and they have tried to enforce those rules. Each generation has shared its knowledge with the next, and they have adapted to their environment, whether it was by the way they dressed, how they lived or the kind of work they did.
For billions of years people lived in the Paleolithic age. Let's talk about humans then. Paleolithic people tended to live in small groups of twenty called bands and each band had a leader called the headman. The headman did not necessarily have the role of a dictator but more of a decision-maker in matters such as when it is time to move on or who gets the water and how much when there is a water shortage.
Men and women had their specific roles in the Old Stone Age. We call men the hunters and women the gather
Some drastic changes happened to the human race. People found that planting their own crops and domesticating their own animals could provide them with more food than hunting and gathering.
One of the main aspects of living in the Paleolithic age was how humans adapted to their environment and how the environment shaped them. People did not know any better way to survive than to follow their food source. They gathered and they hunted and when they depleted all their sources, they picked up and moved on. They did not have a lot of possessions either because they were always on the move.
The enforcement of rules in a small group like that was very flexible. People needed each other to survive and the ultimate punishment was to ostracize somebody. We could almost say that they lived like a family.
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