<P> Archaeological data indicates that the domestication of various types of plants and animals happened in separate locations worldwide, starting in the geological epoch of the Holocene around 12,500 years ago . It was the world's first historically verifiable revolution in agriculture . The Neolithic Revolution greatly narrowed the diversity of foods available, with a switch to agriculture which led to a downturn in human nutrition . </P> <P> The Neolithic Revolution involved far more than the adoption of a limited set of food - producing techniques . During the next millennia it would transform the small and mobile groups of hunter - gatherers that had hitherto dominated human pre-history into sedentary (non-nomadic) societies based in built - up villages and towns . These societies radically modified their natural environment by means of specialized food - crop cultivation, with activities such as irrigation and deforestation which allowed the production of surplus food . </P> <P> These developments provided the basis for densely populated settlements, specialization and division of labour, more trade, the development of non-portable art and architecture, centralized administrations and political structures, hierarchical ideologies, depersonalized systems of knowledge (e.g. writing), and property ownership . The earliest known civilization developed in Sumer in southern Mesopotamia (c . 5,500 BP); its emergence also heralded the beginning of the Bronze Age . </P> <P> The relationship of the above - mentioned Neolithic characteristics to the onset of agriculture, their sequence of emergence, and empirical relation to each other at various Neolithic sites remains the subject of academic debate, and varies from place to place, rather than being the outcome of universal laws of social evolution . The Levant saw the earliest developments of the Neolithic Revolution from around 10,000 BC, followed by sites in the wider Fertile Crescent . The Neolithic Revolution "inspired some of the most important developments in human history including the invention of the wheel, the planting of the first cereal crops and the development of cursive script, mathematics, astronomy and agriculture ." </P>

When did the neolithic revolution begin and end