Farming village at Mehrgarh and the Neolithic of South Asia

Date

c. 7000 BCE

Category

Social & demographic

Region

South Asia (Baluchistan, Pakistan)

Era

Prehistory

Significance

On the Kachi plain at the foot of the Bolan Pass in Baluchistan (modern Pakistan), the settlement of Mehrgarh became the earliest known farming community in the Indian subcontinent.

Its inhabitants cultivated wheat and barley, herded cattle, sheep and goats, built mud-brick houses and granaries, and over time developed pottery, bead-making and early copper-working. Mehrgarh records the gradual shift of South Asian populations from foraging to settled agriculture, with locally domesticated zebu cattle complementing crops and livestock that ultimately derived from the Fertile Crescent. The long, continuous sequence at the site — spanning several millennia — makes it a key bridge between the first farmers of western Asia and the later urban Indus (Harappan) civilisation, of which it is widely regarded as a precursor. Mehrgarh thus marks the independent rooting of the Neolithic way of life across the Iranian plateau and into the Indus borderlands.

Related social & demographic events

• Çatalhöyük and the great Neolithic towns of Anatolia
  c. 7100 – 5950 BCE
• Cattle pastoralism and early astronomy at Nabta Playa in the Green Sahara
  c. 7500 BCE (onset; megalithic phase c. 4800 BCE)
• Anatomically modern Homo sapiens appears in Africa
  c. 300,000 years ago
• Rise of the Yamnaya Culture and Steppe Pastoralism
  c. 3300 BCE
• The Natufian culture and the first sedentary hunter-gatherers
  c. 15,000 – 11,500 years ago (c. 13,000–9500 BCE)
• Uruk becomes the world's first city
  c. 4000–3100 BCE

Further reading

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

The wider story

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Yuval Noah Harari

Global best-seller on how our species, its populations and societies remade the world.

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