Cultivating Revolutions

Early farmers may have sown social upheavals from the Middle East to Europe

Nearly 80 years ago, the British archaeologist V. Gordon Childe championed a theory of what he called a revolution in food production during the Neolithic age. Childe proposed that hunting-and-gathering groups in the Middle East had been the first people to grow crops, raise animals for food, and live year-round in villages—around 10,000 years ago.