Neolithic Era

Neolithic, often known as the New Stone Age, is the final stage of prehistoric humans' cultural progress or technological development. 

Stone tools fashioned by polishing or grinding, reliance on domesticated plants or animals, settlement in permanent settlements, and the appearance of crafts like pottery and weaving were all characteristics. The Neolithic Period came after the Paleolithic Period, or the age of chipped-stone tools, and before the Bronze Age, or the age of metal tools.

The beginning of the Neolithic period is disputed, with different portions of the world reaching the Neolithic stage at different dates, but it is widely assumed to have occurred around 10,000 BCE. 

Humans learnt to grow crops and keep domestic livestock during this time, and were no longer reliant on hunting, fishing, and gathering wild vegetables. Neolithic peoples were able to build permanent structures and cluster in villages thanks to the production of cereal grains, and their freedom from nomadism and a hunting-gathering economy allowed them to pursue specialized skills.

From a starting point in the Fertile Crescent, archaeological evidence suggests that the transition from food-gathering cultures to food-producing cultures progressed gradually across Asia and Europe. 

The earliest evidence of agriculture and animal domestication in southern Asia has been dated to around 9500 BCE, implying that these practices may have started earlier. By 7000 BCE, the Tigris and Euphrates river valleys (today in Iraq and Iran) as well as Syria, Israel, Lebanon, and Jordan had firmly established a way of life based on farming and settled settlements.

Farmers raised barley and wheat, as well as sheep and goats, which were eventually augmented by cattle and pigs. Their ideas went northward from the Middle East along two routes: through Turkey and Greece into central Europe, and then through Egypt and North Africa to Spain. 

Farming settlements first developed in Greece around 7000 BCE, and over the next four millennia, farming spread across the continent. The Mesolithic, which lasted until after 3000 BCE in Britain and Scandinavia, was a lengthy and slow shift.

By 5000 BCE, Neolithic technologies had expanded eastward to India's Indus River valley. 

Around 3500 BCE, millet and rice farming villages arose in China's Huang He (Yellow River) basin and Southeast Asia. 

In the New World, Neolithic lifestyles were developed independently. From 6500 BCE onwards, corn (maize), beans, and squash were gradually domesticated in Mexico and Central America, while sedentary village life did not begin until much later, around 2000 BCE.

The Neolithic was followed by the Bronze Age in the Old World, when human communities discovered how to combine copper and tin to make bronze, which replaced stone as a tool and weapon.