What Really Happened During the Neolithic Revolution?

Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson

In our last blog post, we examined the explanatory power of Jared Diamond’s book Guns, Germs and Steel. A viable position is that while the argument in his book cannot explain modern inequality amongst nations, it can explain where the Neolithic Revolution took place and thus, at least in part, account for inter-continental inequality before 1500.

But we also saw that the distribution of domesticable plants and animals doesn’t show a distinct pattern singling out southeastern Turkey and the banks of River Jordan as the places where the Neolithic Revolution should have taken place.

This should not be surprising. Economic success is all about innovation and technology. But technology itself depends on institutions — and on institutional innovations.

The Neolithic Revolution was not only a set of technological innovations associated with farming and herding. It was also an institutional revolution — people became sedentary and social and political life changed.

Diamond’s argument, which has essentially become the conventional wisdom on this topic, is that the the introduction of farming was a direct result of the greater benefits from farming in terms of greater domesticable crop and animal species, and this major technological change then caused institutional change.

Though popular, this argument is at odds with the archaeological evidence, which instead shows extensive social and institutional change prior to the transition to farming in the Middle East.

Consider the hill of Göbekli Tepe in southeastern Turkey. Soon after 9600BCE people came and carved massive T-shaped pillars out of limestone, an example of which is shown in the next picture.

Many pillars were 8 feet high and weighed 7 tons and had been brought from as far as 100 meters away. They were sunk into circular structures cut into the hill, and many of the pillars were carved with wild animals, snakes, wild cattle, gazelles, wild boars. More >>