Neolithic

Stone was now ground smooth and drilled: axes became even and strong, and sickles and grinding stones appeared for the harvest. Beside the tools stood clay pots for storing grain, and the first woven cloth.

Grinding takes far longer than knapping, and that is the point. A ground axe is worth the hours because it will fell trees for years — the first tools made as an investment rather than for the task in front of you.

Villages were built of wood, clay and stone, with livestock and sown fields close by. Stores carried people through the winter, so they stayed in one place for years and their numbers grew fast.

Staying put has a cost that rarely gets mentioned. Living close to animals and to your own waste, on a narrower diet, made people shorter and sicker than the foragers before them. Farming won because it fed more people, not because it fed them better.

Everyday things now carried decoration: pots were covered with patterns of lines, spirals and notches. People modelled figurines of humans and animals and made beads of stone, bone and shell.

Decoration on a cooking pot is a quiet revolution. Art moves off the cave wall and into the hands of everyone, on objects used daily — and the patterns become regional, which means a pot can now say where it is from.

Life depended on the harvest, so the earth, the sun and the rain were honoured. Sanctuaries and great stone structures appeared, and the dead were buried beside the village — the ancestors stayed part of the community.

Raising a stone monument takes coordinated labour from more people than any single family. These structures are evidence of organisation as much as of belief.

Farming was not invented once. It appears independently in the Fertile Crescent, in China, in Mesoamerica, in the Andes and in New Guinea, with different crops in each. The map shows separate beginnings, not one idea spreading.