After Nearly 2 Million Years as Hunter-Gatherers, Why Did Humans Start Building Permanent Homes Around 10,000 Years Ago? — Here’s What Scientists Suspect

For almost 2 million years, humans were believed to be hunter-gatherers. It meant that they survived by moving from one place to another to find an environment that would allow them to hunt animals and gather resources. For all those years, their primary way of life was not by settling or staying in one place for too long, like we do today in the modern world.

However, something changed just over 10,000 years ago. Early humans began to build permanent homes or settlements. Then what comes next transformed human history in ways that would accelerate our progression as a civilization, often referred to as the Neolithic Revolution. But what exactly happened to trigger this change after so long? Let’s explore this idea and these questions deeper.

The End of the Ice Age and the Start of Farming

The Last Glacial Period, or the last ice age, ended nearly 12,000 years ago. The world became much warmer, and vegetation began to spread into new regions. Animals and new plant species followed, and overall, the environment became much less harsh to survive in, especially for Homo sapiens.

These new warmer and wetter conditions favored the growth of annual plants like wild cereal, wheat, and barley, especially in a region called the Fertile Crescent (modern Iraq, Syria, Turkey, and Israel). This also created a climatic stability that allowed early humans to predict the weather and seasons, which later on became important for agricultural development.

With an abundance of plants growing, early humans began to spend more time harvesting and processing them. It was a complex interaction where their harvesting practices led to the unintentional selection of certain traits of plants in the wild. It was a long and gradual development towards the domestication of crops.

Over time, this led to the idea that by actively and systematically planting seeds, they could control and cultivate their own food supply. They also learned which plants to select and breed, favoring those larger and more nutritious seeds that also have predictable growth and stability. All of these factors soon resulted in early humans having to make their first intentional permanent homes.

Read more: Smithsonian

The First Permanent Homes

What Were Humans Doing 10,000 Years Ago?

So, how did this agricultural revolution lead to the creation of the permanent homes of early humans just over 10,000 years ago? As their skills of planting crops, harvesting, and processing them improved over many generations, farming became a more prominent source of their food supply. This shift is gradual, with hunting and gathering resources in the wild still in play, but slowly becoming less widespread.

Soon, the incentive to abandon the nomadic lifestyle became worth it, such as a more reliable food supply and a more sedentary life that led to the development of infrastructures. This resulted in early humans being fundamentally tied to a specific land or territory.

In other words, the development of permanent homes was more of a necessity than a luxury choice. Unlike hunting and gathering, farming requires a much larger amount of time and labor. Early humans needed to remain in one location to protect their crops, animals, and ensure that the harvest was enough and on time.

The development of permanent homes gave them the benefit of a shelter in the same location. A base where they could rest, eat, and sleep, while being able to tend to and guard their farms all year round.

Why Did Humans Choose to Settle?

There are many reasons why humans could think that farming life was better than being hunter-gatherers for nearly 2 million years. The first one is the reliable food supply, and more often a surplus that helps them not get hungry when the seasons change.

This led to a significant increase in population, as it means that with more family or group members, the workload becomes easier for each individual on the farm. Settling down allowed for more children to survive and grow into adulthood.

Another reason is the specialization of labor or its division. With a surplus of reliable food supply and human capital, as families become larger, not everyone is required to focus their time and labor on food production. This phenomenon allowed individuals to specialize in other tasks, which gave birth to different arts, infrastructure, and new technologies.

The third reason why humans chose the sedentary lifestyle over the nomadic one was the technological innovations that made their lives easier and tasks more efficient. This includes pottery for cooking and storing food, and more advanced stone tools for farming.

Lastly, it was for the safety and cooperation that the need for defense of a farm created. A permanent settlement with a high number of people, advanced tools, and a food supply requires fortifications against wild animals and other groups of humans. This led to the development of defense structures such as walls and watch towers that brought closer social cohesion for collective safety.

Read more: National Geographic

How Permanent Homes Changed Human History

The Neolithic Revolution - Mini-Documentary

It may sound like a simple decision to settle down and build permanent homes and abandon the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, but it became the catalyst for one of the most profound revolutions in human history. First, as families grew larger and more people worked together in a farm, with their permanent homes and supply of food and other resources, a village was born.

Early settlements started as small villages, but over time, the stability and time and space for innovation provided by farming and permanent homes, their population grew exponentially. It led to a complex social structure of a community with organized leadership, specialized roles, and rules.

This sedentary lifestyle also created other concepts of living, such as private properties, wealth accumulation, and material ownership. So, the need to manage and track the stored food and land led to the development of early writings and accounting. Soon, villages turned into cities with dense populations and became centers of trading, commerce, and intellectual or technological exchange.

This ability to live in one place led to the rise of an unprecedented level of social organization and hierarchy. It gave birth to the mobilization of larger numbers of individuals towards specialized big projects like making better and stronger walls for defense, or an irrigation system to make farming more efficient, and so on.

From these roots, the large-scale civilizations were born, such as Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley, laying the groundwork for the modern world.

Author's Final Thoughts

While this article provides a historical overview of why and how early humans began building permanent homes, it simplifies the pace at which the progress of humanity increased in just the last 10,000 years after early humans started farming and settling in one place. There are a lot more factors that contributed to human civilization after settling down.

However, the permanent homes and settlements were the starting point of a cascade of innovation and social transformations that led to the birth of villages, cities, civilizations, and ultimately the empires and countries that shaped the course of human history as we know it.

Read next: Why Did Humans Begin Making Jewelry and Ornaments 130,000 Years Ago? — Here’s What It Reveals About Our Earliest Ancestors

References & Further Reading

Richerson, P. J., Boyd, R., & Bettinger, R. L. (2001). Was agriculture impossible during the Pleistocene but mandatory during the Holocene? A climate change hypothesis. American Antiquity. https://www.des.ucdavis.edu/faculty/richerson/agorigins_2_12_01.pdf

Zeder, M. A. (2011). The Origins of Agriculture in the Near East. Current Anthropology. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/659307

Svizzero, S., & Tisdell, C. (2014). The Neolithic Revolution and Human Societies: Diverse Origins and Development Paths. Working Paper, University of Queensland. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/262183957_Working_Paper_No_192_The_Neolithic_Revolution_and_Human_Societies_Diverse_Origins_and_Development_Paths

Jones, G., Kluyver, T., Preece, C., et al. (2021). The origins of agriculture: Intentions and consequences. Journal of Archaeological Science. https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/167835/

Steckel, R. H., & others. (2007). A New Approach to the Neolithic Revolution. National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Working Paper. https://users.nber.org/~confer/2007/daes07/steckel.pdf

Sadowski, R. F. (2017). The Neolithic Revolution. (PDF) ResearchGate. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/318094192_Neolithic_Revolution