The transition from foraging to farming is a process that began during the Late Pleistocene and continued for several millennia during the Holocene in various parts of the Old and New Worlds. From a global evolutionary viewpoint this seems to be just a short time span, but for the individuals who participated in the yearly unfolding of events in their communities, whether they voluntarily adopted farming or were coerced into it, farming probably would not have been an easy adaptation. The advent of farming brought about dramatic socio-economic shifts that we incorporate under the label of the Neolithic Revolution. To understand the great impact of this shift, it is best to compare it to the impact of the Industrial Revolution, just with a slower pace of technological achievement.

The causes of the Neolithic or Agricultural Revolution are highly debated and will not be discussed in detail in this chapter. Suffice it to say that while it was compulsory during the Holocene (Richerson et al. 2001), it was already a possible option during the Bølling–Ållerød (c. 14,500 to 12,800 BP), a sub-period that punctuated the post-Late Glacial Maximum (LGM) when “demographic pressures” were rapidly building up (Bar-Yosef 1998 and references therein). Thus, the crisis of the cold and dry Younger Dryas (YD) event (12,800 to 11,700/500 BP) forced several territorially coerced populations of hunter–gatherers to initiate a “low level food production” (Smith 2001). The newly initiated or intensified subsistence strategy found its full success during the early millennia of the Holocene.