The Neolithic was the dawn of agriculture. Originating around 10,000 BC in the
Fertile Crescent, agriculture spread across Eurasia and North Africa over the following millennia, ushering in a new era of prehistory. Despite prior assumptions of immediate radical change, In archaeological terms, the Neolithic is marked by
megaliths, ceremonial structures, complex tombs, and elaborate artifacts with apparent spiritual significance. Sociologically speaking, the Neolithic saw the transition from nomadic bands to sedentary villages. This decreased the egalitarianism of those societies that transitioned; instead of more loosely collected confederates, they were now led by individuals with increasing power over those people within their domain. This "big man" framework centralised religion and elevated the status of religious leaders. As the spectrum of human experience shifted from hunter-gatherers to farmers, so did ritual and religion. The ritual calendar of Neolithic life revolved around the harvest; the people of the age worshipped grain-oriented deities, prayed and sacrificed for good harvests, and threw celebrations in the harvest season. The Neolithic saw the emergence of a "spiritual aristocracy" of people whose societal role was as mages, missionaries, and monarchs. In the Neolithic, shamanism was increasingly understood as the domain of an elite, rather than the Paleolithic conceptualisation, in which a relatively broad spectrum of society could practice. The era broadly seems to have heralded the beginning of sharp social stratification, as understood from skeletal and archaeological remains.
Art, sculpture, and monuments of the
Outer Hebrides, Scotland Particularly in its heartland of the
Near East, the Neolithic was an artistically and technologically rich era. The rock art culturally associated with the Paleolithic did not disappear in the Neolithic, and in regions like south India it indeed flourished well into the era. As well as continuing old forms, the Neolithic permitted the emergence of new kinds of art and design. As people moved from nomadic to sedentary lifestyles, they built houses that represented units united through physical structures, "subsum[ing] individuals into new corporate identities". They also built
megaliths, huge stone monuments with widely speculated theological and cultural implications. Though a few hunter-gatherers, such as the
Jōmon people of Japan, made pottery, pottery overall is another art form that emerged only in the Neolithic. Neolithic art with apparent ritual significance occurs throughout broad geographic ranges. The
Liangzhu culture of the southern Chinese
Yangtze Delta produced complex and abundant jade artifacts, some of vast size for grave goods—up to . Many of these jades featured engravings of unusual creatures in complex finery. In Japan, the transition from Jōmon hunter-gatherers to
Yayoi agriculturalists was marked by the production of Jōmon ceramic figurines apparently intended to ward away the Yayoi invaders; the Yayoi in turn carved intricate ornaments and built vast shrines. In
Macedonia, clay models of human and ram heads represent apparent household ritual and suggest that ordinary houses could be host to religious activity just as much as shrines or temples. One of the most famous forms of Neolithic art and architecture were the megalithic
stone circles of Western Europe, of which the most known is
Stonehenge in
South West England. Stone circles are particularly associated with the
British Isles, which hosts 1,303 extant circles, the plurality in
Scotland. Stone circles were not simple constructions but built through complex processes where the stones travelled long distances to their foundations; parts of Stonehenge were sourced away in
Wales. This technically complex construction is thought to be a herald of their supernatural power to the people who built it; the
Preseli Hills, where Stonehenge was sourced, may have held deep significance to the megalith's builders. Though the exact role of stone circles is unclear, they seem to have been, in part or whole,
mausoleums. Many contain skeletons, particularly skulls. These seem to track to
ancestor worship, and in particular the veneration of deceased members of elite spiritual social classes. Stone circles also appear linked to cycles of the sun and moon. Stonehenge, for instance, is aligned such that on the
solstice the sun rises and sets directly behind it. Neolithic statues are another area of interest. The
Ayn Ghazal statues unearthed in
Jordan in the 1980s were an object of archaeological fascination. These statues may have represented gods, legendary leaders, or other figures of great power. The two-headed statues are of especial interest;
Gary O. Rollefson suggests they may have represented the fusion of two previously separate communities. Elsewhere, statues have inspired varied theological interpretations.
Maltese statues of women are, to some authors, suggestive of Neolithic goddess worship. The idea Neolithic peoples had a female-centric religion worshipping goddesses holds some purview in popular culture, but is disputed amongst anthropologists. In addition, though the goddess perspective of Neolithic religion oft assumes a female-centric religious practice, goddess-centric religions in comparable written societies may be dominated by men or women.
Burial and funerary rites Burial appears to be more widespread in the Neolithic than in the Upper Paleolithic. In a wide area from the Levant through central Europe, Neolithic burials are frequently found in the houses their denizens lived in; in particular, women and children dominate amongst those buried inside the home. For children in particular, this may have represented the continued inclusion of these children in the family unit and a
reincarnation cycle where those children were reborn as living members of the family. As in the Paleolithic, some Neolithic burials may represent sacrificial victims; a group burial in modern-day
Henan, containing four skeletons, may have been the death of an important figure heralded by three sacrifices. Neolithic burials display social inequality. At the Campo de Hockey
necropolis in Spain, grave goods are unevenly distributed, and those found are often high-status ornamental objects such as jewellery. This is coterminous with the hypothesised Neolithic emergence of the "big men", societal figures who proclaimed themselves religious and earthly leaders of inegalitarian societies. In the most radical interpretations of Neolithic society, agriculture itself was a practice enforced upon people such that these rulers could acquire power over a more legible sedentary society. Across the Near East, burial inequality is marked in different ways by different societies. In the
Lower Galilee, some dead were buried close to their houses, but others were buried in dedicated funerary monuments. Across the Levant, skeletons with the deceased's features modelled in plaster can be found; these individuals are thought to have had a different status in their societies than those buried without such preservation. In the
Judaean Desert, decedents were found preserved in a "gelatinous material" and surrounded by blades, beads, and masks. Sex and gender play roles in Neolithic burial. The Henan burial with potential sacrificial victims was composed of three men and one woman, and was read as a male shaman and his followers. Other Neolithic Chinese burials of people interpreted as shamans have been of girls and women, such as two girls found in elaborate tombs at a site in
Shanxithe only non-adults in that burial ground.
Sarah Milledge Nelson wrote that burials of subjects of apparent religious importance were often clouded by a lack of clarity as to the subject's sex because of the difficulty of determining sex with certainty from skeletal remains; the focal decedent in "the richest of all Mesoamerican burials" was sexed male, but with low confidence, and could theoretically have been a woman.
Lifestyle of pottery-making in Neolithic China Much of what is understood about Neolithic life comes from individual settlements with particularly preserved archaeological records, such as
Çatalhöyük in southern
Anatolia. Çatalhöyük was settled for a long period, from around 7100 BC to 6000 BC, and provides a snapshot of a changing era. Residents of Çatalhöyük lived in shared houses with non-relatives, drawing their closest connections to "practical kin" rather than "official kin"; they seem to have been divided into two sub-communities, going by different dental patterns in their skeletal remains, and were possibly
patrilocal, with men staying in the community of their birth and women moving away. Nonetheless, Çatalhöyük is not representative of all Neolithic communities; most such communities demonstrated poor nutrition and stunted growth, whereas the people of Çatalhöyük appeared to have adequate nutrition and were able to support substantial population growth. From these preserved settlements, archaeologists try to extract religious practices in day-to-day Neolithic life. In 'Ain Ghazal, "mundane archaeological remains" coincide with striking findings such as caches of skulls, ceremonially buried statues, and hundreds of clay figurines. Many of these figurines seem to have been fertility and birth charms; birth during the Neolithic was "the most dangerous time of a woman's life", and spiritual protection against
maternal death of the utmost importance. Other figurines seem to have been used as pseudo-sacrifices, ritually 'killed' and buried around human habitations. Clay figurines broadly have been found in many Neolithic communities, and the individual communities that made them are extrapolated based on their features. Sites in North China, for instance, find a paucity of figurines of humans compared to those of animals, while their southern peers made more human figurines and particularly sexually explicit ones. It is often unclear exactly what role such figurines held to the societies that made them; in addition to religious objects, they may have held more mundane functions such as toys, or even been both at once. The theological practices of people in early state societies with written records, somewhat later than the Neolithic, revolved around their daily lives. In particular, these societies focused on the cultivation and harvest of grains, and their religions followed suit; they worshipped grain gods and had
liturgical calendars revolving around the harvest. Like other prehistoric-like societies described in written records, these experiences may be comparable to those of Neolithic agriculturalists. In some regions, evidence also exists for
solar worship and
lunar worship; for instance, British and Irish stone circles are generally aligned with the movement of the sun, which plausibly played a role in their ritual significance. Neolithic religions were probably heavily ritual-based. These rituals would have signalled membership of and investment in the communities of those who performed them; these communities had labour- and health-expensive initiation rituals (consider the
penile subincision performed by some
Indigenous Australians), and practising them marked people as members of a given community - both to the community's allies and to its enemies - even if they were later to try to strike out on their own. This preserved the health of such communities; their members developed a deep identity as members, as people whose fortunes were tied to the broader community, and preferred to stay rather than split. At Çatalhöyük, traditionally considered a centre of goddess worship on account of figurines found in the area, followers of
new religious movements would take pilgrimages to the ruins as a holy site; the sociologist
Ayfer Bartu Candan reported seeing a woman eat a handful of soil from the ruins in front of the mayor of the nearby town of
Çumra. The popularity of the "Great Goddess" concept of Neolithic religion can be traced to Gimbutas's concept of a peaceful matriarchal Neolithic, where a goddess was worshipped in a pan-European religion; the roots of the concept emerged as early as the 1940s and 1950s, with seminal works by
Robert Graves,
Jacquetta Hawkes, and
O. G. S. Crawford pioneering the concept. However, the idea was based on flawed methodologies and conflation of different movements across vast geographical areas, and is unlikely to be representative of actual Neolithic religious practice. This seems to be reflective of a broad Neolithic tendency towards
animal worship; the nearby site of
Göbekli Tepe also bears significant evidence for the ritual and religious significance of animals. The
Xinglongwa and
Hongshan cultures of northeastern China carved elaborate jade sculptures of pigs and dragons speculated to have some religious role; China was one of the first major sites of animal domestication, and domestic animals seem to have played wide-ranging roles in Neolithic Chinese ritual practice, in particular as sacrificial goods for high-ranking spiritual leaders. Compared to the Paleolithic, shamanism seems to have become more peripheral during the Neolithic. In many regions, priests of increasingly centralised faiths probably took over isolated shamanic functions, although shamanism and domestic cults of personal deities clearly continued. Meanwhile, in the highly stratified societies of the Neolithic, elite secret societies flourished amongst the powerful. In these unequal worlds, the spiritually powerful were able to manipulate faith to convince the general population of their social and spiritual subordinacy.
Chalcolithic Copper Age settlement in Spain The
Chalcolithic, or Copper Age, was the transitional period between the Neolithic and
Bronze Age. In the Copper Age, an early understanding of
metallurgy enabled the production of simple copper tools to supplement stone tools, but not the deliberate production of its improved
alloy, bronze. In the Levant, the Copper Age is typified by social, agricultural, and artistic innovation.
Horticulture of plants such as olives became a major complement to grain agriculture, while the animal products available to farmers diversified. Settlements expanded and came to inhabit broader geographical ranges, while the art and textiles of the area made great strides in both ornamental capacities and symbolic representation. This contrasts with their peers in Egypt and Mesopotamia, who remained somewhat more inhibited throughout the era. Further west and especially north, the concept of the Copper Age grows controversial; the "British Chalcolithic" is particularly unclear, with both support and opposition for the idea that copper metallurgy heralded a particular era in British prehistory.
Proto-Indo-Europeans One of the major hypothesised cultures of the Copper Age was the
Proto-Indo-Europeans, from whom all Indo-European language and mythology may have evolved. The Proto-Indo-Europeans are speculatively known through the reconstructed
Proto-Indo-European language, which bears traces of religion;
*Dyḗws, the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European sky god, developed into, for instance, the Greek
Zeus and all he begat. *Dyḗws was the presumed leader of a pantheon of deities including
*Dhuĝhatḗr Diwós ("sky daughter"), ("dawn goddess"),
*Neptonos ("water grandson"), and
*Perkʷunos ("thunder god"). There was also
*Manu-, humanity's ancestor, who became
Mannus of
Germanic paganism and similar to
Manu of early Hinduism. There has been some reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European afterlife, "a land of green pastures, where age and sickness are unknown", accessible only via dangerous travels through a watery, hound-guarded maelstrom. Proto-Indo-European religion is understood through the reconstruction of shared elements of ancient faith across the regions influenced by the Proto-Indo-Europeans. For instance, shared portions of the
Odyssey and the
Mahābhārata permit reconstruction of a "proto-epic" from which both tales descend. From this scholars infer "a rich mythology of which only distant echoes have come to us" Hayden also argues for
entheogenic rites amongst the Proto-Indo-Europeans, particularly a psychoactive "drink of immortality" backformed from the Indo-Iranian
soma and
madhu and the Greek
ambrosia, which was imbibed by Proto-Indo-European priests. ==Bronze and Iron Ages==