3. 10,000 BCE- Agricultural Revolution: A Great Mistake
The Agricultural Revolution allowed humanity to evolve from small hunter-gatherer tribes to societies capable of building advanced civilizations, but did women lose more than they gained? Women became slaves to the grindstone, health declined, and hierarchies established gender norms that lasted millennia. However, birth rates and surpluses of food improved, and everything considered modern evolved from the Agricultural Revolution. Weighing it all - it's hard to say whether this was revolutionary for women.
How to cite this source?
Remedial Herstory Project Editors. "3. 10,000 BCE - THE AGRICULTURAL REVOLUTION: A GREAT MISTAKE?" The Remedial Herstory Project. November 1, 2025. www.remedialherstory.com.
Between 10,500 and 8,500 BCE, humans began to switch from hunting and gathering to farming; a change that led to larger populations in permanent settlements in many parts of the world. This development is known as the first Agricultural Revolution or the Neolithic Revolution. Over many generations, the shift to agriculture led to the creation of cities, the emergence of organized religions and political structures, and trade between people in different localities. But as we learn more and more about how humans lived before the Agricultural Revolution, it seems like we might have lost more than we gained.
The Agricultural Revolution took place at different times in different parts of the world, but the first one began in what we call the Fertile Crescent, the land between the Tigris and Euphrates River Valleys in Mesopotamia to the Nile River Valley in Egypt. It is here that archeologists have found the earliest evidence of the beginning of agriculture. That is where we will take our closest look at the evidence, focusing on bones and artifacts from two cultures in the Fertile Crescent: the neolithic farming settlement at Abu Hureyra and the settled hunter-gatherers of the Natufian culture prior to the Neolithic Revolution. We will also consider evidence anthropologists have gathered from foraging societies that exist today.
Neolithic (n.), the later part of the Stone Age, when ground or polished stone weapons and implements prevailed.
Natufian (n.), a prehistoric culture of people who lived in the Levant region of the Eastern Mediterranean between 15,000 and 11,500 years ago.
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Grinding stone (n.), slabs of stone that Aboriginal people used to grind and crush different materials.
Women's Role in the Agricultural Process
Prehistoric women were at the heart of the transition from hunting and gathering to farming. Hunting was generally the task assigned to the most able-bodied people of the community, usually men in their prime. Women, children, and the elderly worked together to gather grains, fruit, and legumes from the wild. It is possible that women were the ones who observed the connection between fallen seeds and a richer harvest when they returned to a certain spot later.
The earliest version of farming predated the Bronze Age, so it did not involve a plow. The farmer would use a stick to poke a hole in which the seed was dropped. After harvest, women would do much, if not all, of the food preparation.
There is evidence that women in the earliest farming communities were physically very strong. An analysis of prehistoric women’s arm bone fragments reveals that ancient women had bone strength that measured 9% stronger than modern athletic women. That strength came with a cost, however. When Theya Molleson of the British Museum looked at the remains of women from Abu Hureyra, a site occupied for 6,000 years in what is now Syria, she found evidence that women spent hours kneeling over their grinding stones, resulting in deformed toes, curved thigh bones, and arthritic knees and backs. Pre-agriculture skeletons revealed none of those issues. Furthermore, the teeth of neolithic farming people first showed more wear and tear as tiny bits of stone ended up in the grain, and later showed more cavities and gum disease as the soft porridge they ate left a build-up of sugar and carbohydrates on the tooth enamel.
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Remains of a Natufian woman and her dog
The Human Diet
As the shift to agriculture occurred, it appears that farming peoples worked harder and were far less healthy overall. Farming peoples had a less nutritious diet based on only a few crops compared to a diet based on a variety of gathered foods. Ancient farmers likely developed heart conditions and digestive difficulties, among other conditions as a result.
How do we know that the diet of the earliest farmers was deficient when compared to that of hunter-gatherers? We can’t be certain if this was true of all prehistoric peoples, but evidence from Natufian sites tell us that their diets were rich, and people did not have to work hard to get enough to eat. Although we used to assume that life before farming was brutal, archeologists have unearthed evidence that dramatically alters what we thought we knew about life before the Neolithic Revolution. One site, Ohalo II - located in modern Israel - was inhabited continuously for several generations almost 23,000 years ago, before being burned down - which may have been an intentional part of migrating to a new space. These humans were hunter-gatherers, relying on wild grains and fruits, along with the fish and game that could be found along the shores of the Sea of Galilee. They survived on a rich array of resources without having to travel to find them, and they also showed some of the earliest known signs of crop cultivation, well before the Agricultural Revolution.
Archeologists have found the remains of food such as almonds, pistachios, olives, grapes, and many other edible plants. Among these is a fruit known as the rubus, which is similar to a blackberry. That’s something that had to be eaten fresh. Animal remains included a wide variety of fish, turtles, waterfowl, and several breeds of mammal ranging from rabbit to gazelles. Archaeologists also found grinding stones that still held fragments of barley, wheat, and oats. There were even sickle blades, showing us the residents of this tiny village had figured out how to harvest, although the evidence suggests they engaged only in small-scale planting. For example, archeologists have found very little wear and tear on the sickle blades, supporting the idea that they were only used occasionally.
The Impact on the Body
Residents in this settlement were likely well fed but probably not overworked. Men’s and women’s skeletons were very similar in terms of wear and tear and overall health. It was only after humans took up farming that women’s bodies bore the mark of physical labor from activities such as bending over a grindstone. Farming people were also shorter than earlier humans, due to their limited diet.
Historian Jared Diamond, argues,
Farming may have encouraged inequality between the sexes, as well. Freed from the need to transport their babies during a nomadic existence, and under pressure to produce more hands to till the fields, farming women tended to have more frequent pregnancies than their hunter-gatherer counterparts - with consequent drains on their health. Among the Chilean mummies, for example, more women than men had bone lesions from infectious disease.
Ancient farming
Settlements
The Agricultural Revolution represents a move away from tiny settlements like those at Ohalo II and toward massive populations laboring to farm larger and larger territories. The process shows its first dramatic changes in the Fertile Crescent between 9,500 and 8,500 BCE. Humans sought to increase production of wheat, originally a wild grass, but one which grew easily if properly protected. Doing so meant not just plowing the soil and sowing the seeds, it meant draining the land if the weather was too wet and building irrigation ditches if it was too dry. Fences also had to be built to protect wheat from pests like rabbits.
Just as we saw with the regular kneeling to grind grain for hours surrounding the preparation of grains, the labor that went into the planting and protection of the fields left its traces on human bones. Spines, knees, necks, and feet showed increasing damage with every generation of farmers.
Furthermore, settling so many people in one place led to a build-up of human and animal waste, spreading diseases through parasites, infections, and viruses. Likewise, pests too small to block out with fences, such as rats and mice, were attracted to stored food, and the growth of rodent populations attracted predators such as wild cats and dogs, leading to the domestication of those animals.
Fields also had to be protected from human rivals. Although scholars have claimed since the Renaissance that prehistoric humans were violent brutes, their lives were calm compared to the violence that accompanied competition for scarce resources. When a hunter-gatherer group felt the pressure of a stronger bunch of foragers, it could simply move elsewhere. That was no longer an option. The cultivated land had to be protected from scavengers and neighbors or the community would starve. Even the simplest farmer had to be prepared to defend the land.
Egyptian artisan Sennedjem and his wife Ti harvesting wheat
Hierarchy (n.), a system or organization in which people or groups are ranked one above the other according to status or authority.
Entrenched (adj.), (of an attitude, habit, or belief) firmly established and difficult or unlikely to change; ingrained.
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Changes in Social Order
This competition and need to protect the harvest contributed to a growing hierarchy in society. Just as farming might have been advanced by a clever individual who could direct projects and rise in status in the group, the need for protection introduced dedicated warriors to guard the boundaries. The next logical step, of course, was that dedicated warriors and community leaders were increasingly excused from the actual labor and were fed by the work of others. Hierarchies emerged, leaders became entrenched, and over thous ands of years, division of labor extended to specialized occupations that served those in power at the expense of those who worked the hardest.
Burial practices reflected the change in social order. In pre-farming burial sites, the graves of men and women are all roughly the same. People were buried with a few items that seemed to link each person to a particular clan or place. The dead were often buried very near to the homes of descendants, linking the living to the ancestors. After the Agricultural Revolution, graves began to show enormous differences in wealth and status. Poor laborers were buried with almost nothing, while warrior graves contained weapons, and the graves of the wealthy and powerful people contained treasures and food offerings. Just as agriculture created wealth for some, it also created poverty for others.
All territories were increasingly under someone’s control. Even if someone chose to leave life in the settled city, there was not much “free territory” available. If you did find an unclaimed piece of land, it usually required even more hard labor because you and your family had to clear the land in order to survive.
Egalitarian (adj.), relating to or believing in the principle that all people are equal and deserve equal rights and opportunities.
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Pastoralists
During and after the Agricultural Revolution, when enormous cities emerged in Mesopotamia, some semi-migratory groups continued to thrive. They were not foragers, however. They tended to be pastoralists who largely lived off herding goats, sheep, and cattle. These groups continued to enjoy relatively egalitarian social relations. However, life was difficult in early pastoral societies.
A hunter will take any animal he finds, but the farmer will carefully select more easily controlled animals. He will eat male animals and female livestock too old to breed, but spare young female animals to ensure a bigger herd through their young. The movement of animals had to be limited to keep them from wandering off, yet pastoralists had to stay on the move to find enough food for the herd while fending off predators. As a result, sheep, goats, pigs, and cattle as we know them today are almost completely dependent on human care. They would not survive in the wild.
Khoikhoi dismantling their huts, preparing to move to new pastures
Infanticide (n.), the crime of killing a child within a year of its birth.
Why Change?
What made humans settle down and take up farming, if it made life harder and damaged our overall health? One possibility is that humans simply had no choice. At the end of the last great Ice Age, the climate was changing dramatically. Parts of Mesopotamia that we tend to think of purely as desert were actually once very wet. Landscape archeologist Jennifer Pournelle mapped out the elaborate waterways and wetlands that used to cover all of Southern Mesopotamia. The land was lush, and food was plentiful.
However, as the land began to dry up, the great diversity of plants and animals disappeared. Humans were left with the task of encouraging a few edible plants to grow on as much land as possible. The early phases of farming might not have required backbreaking labor, since it was still possible to throw seeds on fertile land that was exposed as waters receded. As the climate became even drier, though, humans had to adapt their work again to make crops grow.
Apart from climate change, another possible explanation for the move towards agriculture has to do with religion. In Turkey, there is an ancient religious complex at Göbekli Tepe, dating back to 9500 BCE. There were no dwellings or fortifications there, and evidence points to this religious site predating widespread farming. There are traces of feasts, in the form of ancient bread and beer, all made from grains collected in the wild. There are large carved sculptures of humans and wild animals. There are a few huge stone monoliths as well. For most of history, we have assumed that large buildings emerged only after the rise of agriculture, but something moved these foragers to cooperate in the creation of something majestic in honor of the gods.
Some mysterious spiritual calling led hunter-gatherers to gather at Göbekli Tepe to build, worship, and then return to their nomadic or semi-settled lives. Ideas about the cosmos and worship of deities may have indicated a growing sense that humans were not like other animals. Some scholars believe that our growing disconnection from nature led to farming rather than farming leading us away from nature.
Why did humans not reverse course when they realized that life had become so much harder? The simplest explanation is that when you see how everything has changed, it’s usually too late to reverse course. Change is gradual, and even if we are aware that society is changing, it is very difficult to figure out how to improve your situation. For example, a serious downside to hunter-gatherer life created the absolute need to limit the size of the population even if that meant committing infanticide to keep numbers low. After the Agricultural Revolution, when surplus food was available, families could feed more people, making it possible to have bigger families. It is difficult after generations of population growth to simply go back to being hunter-gatherers.
There is still some debate regarding the impact of humans having bigger families. Historian Yuval Noah Harari reminds us that humans no longer practiced infanticide after the advent of settled farming, but infant mortality increased all the same. Many farming mothers fed their babies porridge in order to stop nursing and return to heavy labor, and the lack of mother’s milk contributed to illness and weaknesses among children.
Conclusion
It is possible that the life of a forager is better in terms of balance, connection to nature, a varied diet, and mutual respect for all members of the community. But, for all its cost, agriculture has led over time to amazing advances in the arts, science, language, and literature. Once humans began to engage in settled agriculture, everything we enjoy in modern life became possible.
Did the benefits of settled life outweigh the loss of free time and a more equal society where men and women shared responsibilities and roles were less gendered? Could ancient humans have made any other choice? Was it worth it, or was the Agricultural Revolution a huge mistake?