This chapter explores the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture, crafts, trade, and a sedentary lifestyle. Understanding this shift is crucial for grasping how the first cities developed, which ultimately led to the emergence of monetary systems in antiquity.

This section is an extract from the course Ancient Mesopotamia, Life in the Cradle of Civilization, available on The Great Courses website and taught by Professor Amanda Podany of California State Polytechnic University, Pomona.

Primitive agriculture emerged around 10,500 years ago in the Near East, specifically in what is now northwestern Syria and southern Turkey. Today, modern hunter-gatherer groups are in no hurry to adopt agriculture, and the same was likely true during the Neolithic period.

The first villages were clearly built before the domestication of plants and animals. People did not settle down because agriculture allowed them to; on the contrary, they settled first and only much later—about 3,000 years later—did they start farming.

Hunting and gathering was simply a highly effective strategy, so there was no need to plant seeds to produce food. In fact, contemporary hunter-gatherer societies have more leisure time than the first Neolithic farmers, who worked harder to produce food using rudimentary cultivation technologies.

Skeletal studies also show that these first farmers were smaller and less robust than the hunter-gatherers who preceded them. The farmers' diet was more restricted, consisting of far more bread and significantly less meat. Their oral health also suffered; the use of stone tools for grinding flour introduced rock splinters into their food, leading to poorer teeth.

In essence, the shift to agriculture, while allowing for larger populations, came at a significant cost to individual health and quality of life.

Given all these disadvantages, who would have chosen to become a farmer back then? Some popular theories suggest that humans were forced to adopt agriculture and that it wasn't really a choice. Even with wild grains, there was a major problem: large quantities could not be transported easily and had to be stored somewhere. Once the grain was stored, it made sense to stay close by. So, people grew wild grain—which wasn't necessarily agriculture. When grown in large quantities, this grain had to be stored, making transport difficult. This likely contributed to the first phases of sedentarization and may have been the initial reason why people settled in a particular place. If this place provided food all year round, there was no need to follow herds or travel constantly.

In the Natoufian culture, up to a hundred people lived together in villages of round houses. A popular theory explaining the beginnings of agriculture is that this change was stimulated by climate change. Around 11,000 years ago, the climate in the Near East became colder and drier. Plants and animals that had previously been abundant became rarer. Communities would then have begun to cultivate the plants on which they depended or to keep young animals—such as sheep, goats, and cattle, which were well-suited to breeding—to raise for later use. This would have been a very gradual process, so there wasn't a precise moment when they all became farmers who domesticated animals.

Another theory is that the villages themselves created the problem solved by domestication. Intensive hunting and gathering would have destabilized the natural environment. According to one hypothesis, the Natoufians had achieved such demographic success that they had become too numerous for their immediate environment. Thus, the swamps and areas where natural crops grew may not have been productive enough for the village's population. The immediate environment was unable to provide for everyone, compelling them to start cultivating directly on site to increase their food supply.