The increase in food production brought by the development of plow agriculture allowed Neolithic villages to grow ever larger. By 7000 B.C.E. or so, some villages in the Fertile Crescent may have had as many as ten thousand residents. One of the best known of these, Çatal Hüyük in what is now modern Turkey, shows evidence of trade as well as of the specialization of labor. Çatal Hüyük’s residents lived in mud-brick houses whose walls were covered in white plaster and whose interiors were kept very clean, for all trash was taken outside the town. The houses were built next to one another with no lanes or paths separating them, and people seem to have entered through holes in the roofs; the rooftops may have also served as a place for people to congregate, for there is no sign of large public buildings. The men and women of the town grew wheat, barley, peas, and almonds and raised sheep and perhaps cattle, though they also seem to have hunted. They made textiles, pots, figurines, baskets, carpets, copper and lead beads, and other goods, and decorated their houses with murals showing animal and human figures. They gathered, sharpened, and polished obsidian, a volcanic rock that could be used for knives, blades, and mirrors, and then traded it with neighboring towns, obtaining seashells and flint. From here the obsidian was exchanged still farther away, for Neolithic societies slowly developed local and then regional networks of exchange and communication.

Among the goods traded in some parts of the world was copper. Pure copper occurs close to the surface in some areas, and people, including those at Çatal Hüyük, hammered it into shapes for jewelry and tools. More often, copper, like most metals, occurs mixed with other materials in a type of rock called ore, and by about 5500 B.C.E. people in the Balkans had learned that copper could be extracted from ore by heating it in a smelting process. Smelted copper was poured into molds and made into spear points, axes, chisels, beads, and other objects. (See “Individuals in Society: The Iceman.”) Smelting techniques were discovered independently in many places around the world, including China, Southeast Asia, West Africa, and the Andes region. Pure copper is soft, but through experimentation artisans learned that it would become harder if they mixed it with other metals such as arsenic, zinc, or tin during heating, creating an alloy called bronze.

Because it was stronger than copper, bronze had a far wider range of uses, so much so that later historians decided that its adoption marked a new period in human history, the Bronze Age. Like all new technologies, bronze arrived at different times in different places, so the dates of the Bronze Age vary. It began about 3000 B.C.E. in some places, and by about 2500 B.C.E. bronze technology was having an impact in many parts of the world, especially in weaponry. The end of the Bronze Age came with the adoption of iron technology, which also varied in its beginnings from 1200 B.C.E. to 300 B.C.E. (See “Global Trade: Iron.”) All metals were expensive and hard to obtain, however, which meant that stone, wood, and bone remained important materials for tools and weapons long into the Bronze Age.

Objects were not the only things traded over increasingly long distances during the Neolithic period, for people also carried ideas as they traveled on foot or camels, and in boats, wagons, or carts. Knowledge about the seasons and the weather was vitally important for those who depended on crop raising, and agricultural peoples in many parts of the world began to calculate recurring patterns in the world around them, slowly developing calendars. Scholars have demonstrated that people built circular structures of mounded earth or huge upright stones to help them predict the movements of the sun and stars, including Nabta Playa, erected about 4500 B.C.E. in the desert west of the Nile Valley in Egypt, and Stonehenge, erected about 2500 B.C.E. in southern England.

The rhythms of the agricultural cycle and patterns of exchange also shaped religious beliefs and practices. Among foragers, human fertility is a mixed blessing, as too many children can overtax food supplies, but among crop raisers and pastoralists, fertility — of the land, animals, and people — is essential. Shamans and priests developed ever more elaborate rituals designed to assure fertility, in which the gods were often given something from a community’s goods in exchange for their favor, such as food offerings, animal sacrifices, or sacred objects. In many places gods came to be associated with patterns of birth, growth, death, and regeneration. They could bring death and destruction, but they also created life. Figurines, carvings, and paintings from the Neolithic include pregnant women and women giving birth, men with erect penises, and creatures that are a combination of a man and a male animal such as a bull or goat. Like humans, the gods came to have a division of labor and a social hierarchy. Thus there were rain gods and sun gods, sky goddesses and moon goddesses, gods that assured the health of cattle or the growth of corn, goddesses of the hearth and home. Powerful father and mother gods sometimes presided, but they were challenged and overthrown by virile young male gods, often in epic battles. Thus, as human society was becoming more complex, so was the unseen world.