How did the Neolithic Revolution lead to the development of civilization?
With the development of agriculture, humans began to radically transform the environments in which they lived. A growing portion of humans became sedentary cultivators who cleared the lands around their settlements and controlled the plants that grew and the animals that grazed on them. The greater presence of humans was also apparent in the steadily growing size and numbers of settlements. These were found both in areas that they had long inhabited and in new regions that farming allowed them to settle. This great increase in the number of sedentary farmers is primarily responsible for the leap in human population during the Neolithic transition. For tens of thousands of years before agriculture was developed, the total number of humans had fluctuated between an estimated five and eight million persons. By 4000 B.C., after four or five millennia of farming, their number had risen to 60 or 70 million. Hunting-and-gathering bands managed to subsist in the zones between cultivated areas