Was Food-Production a “Revolution”?
If you can see the difference between these two pictures—between life in the food-collecting stage and life after food-production had begun—you’ll see why Professor Childe speaks of a revolution. By revolution, he doesn’t mean that it happened over night or that it happened only once. We don’t know exactly how long it took. Some people think that all these changes may have occurred in less than 500 years, but I doubt that. The incipient era was probably an affair of some duration. Once the level of the village-farming community had been established, however, things did begin to move very fast. By six thousand years ago, the descendants of the first villagers had developed irrigation and plow agriculture in the relatively rainless Mesopotamian alluvium and were living in towns with temples. Relative to the half million years of food-gathering which lay behind, this had been achieved with truly revolutionary suddenness.