NEOLITHIC ART

                 NEOLITHIC ART

Around 9000 Bec, the ice that covered much of northern Europe during the paleolithic period melted as the climate grew  warmer. The sealevel rose more then 300 feet, separating England from continental Europe and spain from Africa . the reinder migrated north,and the wooly mammoth disappeared. The palelolithic gave to a transitional period,the Mesolithic , and then, for several thousend years at different times is different parts of the globe, a great new age, the Neolithic, dawned. Human beings began to domesticate plant and animals and to settle in fixed abodes, Their food supply assured, many grouped changed from hunters to herders, to farmers,and finally to townspeople.Wandering hunters settled down to organizedcommunity livings in villages surroundedn by cultivated fields.

The basis for the conventional division of prehistory into the Paleolithic, Mesolithic,and Neolithic periods is the development of stone impelements. However, a different kind of distinction may be made between an age of food gathering and an age of food production. In this scheme, the Paleolthic period corresponds roughly to the age of food gathering and the Mesolithic period, the last phase of that age is marked by intensified food gathering and the taming of the dog.In the neolithic period,agriculture and stock raising became humankind’s major food sources. The transition to the Neolithic occurred first in the ancient Near East

                   Ancient Near East

The remains of the oldest known settled communities have been founde in the grassy foothills of the antilebanon, Taurus, and Zagros mountains in present-day Turkey, Syria Iraq and Iran These regions provided the necessary precondition for the  development of agriculture.Species of native plants, such as wild wheat and barley, were plentiful as were heards of animals (goats, sheeps,and pigs) that could be domesticated. Sufficient rain occurred for the raisingof crops. When village farming life was wwell developed, some settlers,attracted by the greater fertility of the siol and perhaps alsoby the need to find more land for their rapidly groeing populations, moved into the vallyes and deltas of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

In additions to systematic agriculture the new sedentary societies of the Neolthic Age originated weaving, metalworking, pottery and countings and recording with caly tokens. Soon these innovations spread with remarlable speed throughout the near east . village farming communites such as jarmo in Iraq and Catal Hoyukin southren Anatolia date back to the mid-seventh milennium BCE. 

Neolithic sites in Anatolia and the Near East

The  remarkabl fortifide town of jericho, before whose walls the biblical joshua appeared thousends of years later is even older. Artchaeologists are constantly uncovering surprises and discovery and exploration of new sites each year are compelling Them to revise their views about the emergenceof Neolithic socity, But there sited known for some time –jericho Ain Ghazal and Catal Huyuk-offer a fascinating picture of the rapid and  exciting transformation of human society and of art during the Neolithic period.