Sustainability, culture change, inequality and global health are among the much-discussed challenges of our time, and rightly so, given the drastic effects such variables can have on modern populations. Yet with many populations today living in tightly connected geographic communities—cities, for example—or in highly networked electronic communities, can we still learn anything about societal challenges by studying simple farming communities from many thousands of years ago? We think there is much to learn, be it Malthusian pressures and ancient societal collapse, the devastating effects of European diseases on indigenous New World populations or endemic violence in pre-state societies (e.g. Pinker Reference Pinker2012). By affording a simpler, ‘slow motion’ view of processes that are greatly accelerated in this century, the detailed, long-term record of the European Neolithic can offer insight into many of these fundamental issues. These include: human adaptations to environmental change (Palmer & Smith Reference Palmer and Smith2014), agro-pastoral innovation, human population dynamics, biological and cultural development, hereditary inequality, specialised occupations and private ownership.

Whether the Neolithic is considered part of the Anthropocene (Smith & Zeder Reference Smith and Zeder2013) or part of the ‘Palaeoanthropocene’ (Foley et al. Reference Foley, Gronenborn, Andreae, Kadereit, Esper, Scholz, Pöschl, Jacob, Schöne, Schreg, Vött, Jordan, Lelieveld, Weller, Alt, Gaudzinski-Windheuser, Bruhn, Tost, Sirocko and Crutzen2013), it was the stage in which humans became active shapers of the Earth system. Archaeological evidence from multiple continents suggests that prehistoric land management may, until recently, have been vastly underestimated (e.g. Gartner Reference Gartner2001; Bliege Bird et al. Reference Bliege Bird, Bird, Codding, Parker and Jones2008; Heckenberger & Neves Reference Heckenberger and Neves2009). Ruddiman's (Reference Ruddiman2013) hypothesis—that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide around 8000 years ago and methane about 5000 years ago were anthropogenic, caused by forest clearance, livestock pastoralism and early rice irrigation—can be more specifically tested using archaeological data (e.g. Fuller et al. Reference Fuller, Van Etten, Manning, Castillo, Kingwell-Banham, Weisskopf, Qin, Sato and Hijmans2011; Kaplan et al. Reference Kaplan, Ellis, Ruddiman, Lemmen and Goldewijk2011). In continental Europe, however, there is little evidence for intensified land clearance prior to the Bronze Age, about 3750 years ago (Bradshaw Reference Bradshaw2004; Berglund et al. Reference Berglund, Persson and Björkman2008). This is because the small-scale intensive cultivation of the Linearbandkeramik (LBK) is effectively invisible in pollen diagrams (e.g. Bogaard Reference Bogaard, Whittle and Bickle2014; Lechterbeck et al. Reference Lechterbeck, Edinborough, Kerig, Fyfe, Roberts and Shennan2014). In a Neolithic with a small population size and ephemeral environmental impact (Bogucki Reference Bogucki1993; Zimmermann et al. Reference Zimmermann, Hilpert and Wendt2009), “whole areas may indeed have been subject to only episodic and intermittent occupation for centuries if not millennia after the adoption of agriculture” (Scarre Reference Scarre2000: 828).

Even if the extent of Neolithic land clearance was not substantial everywhere (McMichael et al. Reference McMichael, Piperno, Bush, Silman, Zimmerman, Raczka and Lobato2012), debate concerning the modern Malthusian limits of the planet (Rockström et al. Reference Rockström, Steffen, Noone, Persson, Chapin and Lambin2009; Barnosky et al. Reference Barnosky, Hadly, Bascompte, Berlow, Brown, Fortelius, Getz, Harte, Hastings, Marquet, Martinez, Mooers, Roopnarine, Vermeij, Williams, Gillespie, Kitzes, Marshall, Matzke, Mindell, Revilla and Smith2012; Ehrlich & Ehrlich Reference Ehrlich and Ehrlich2013; Hughes et al. Reference Hughes, Carpenter, Rockström, Scheffer and Walker2013) makes relevant study of prehistoric population growth. The occurrence of the Neolithic on multiple continents reveals how fertility rates vary over very long timescales in the kinds of small-scale subsistence communities that fundamentally inform the evolutionary study of modern fertility (Mace Reference Mace2008; Bocquet-Appel Reference Bocquet-Appel2011). For decades the view has been that agriculture initiated higher fertility in Neolithic Europe, effectively enabling steady population growth for all those subsequent millennia (Bocquet-Appel Reference Bocquet-Appel2011). Although occurring at vastly different rates, both ancient and modern cereal domestication has increased yields, nutrition content and climatic resilience of domestic crops (Dayton Reference Dayton2014).

New evidence, however, indicates that Neolithic populations fluctuated through millennial-scale cycles of population growth and decline (Zimmermann et al. Reference Zimmermann, Hilpert and Wendt2009; Shennan et al. Reference Shennan, Downey, Timpson, Edinborough, Colledge, Kerig, Manning and Thomas2013). In Britain and Ireland, pollen evidence suggests forest clearance by growing numbers of farmers from about 6000 years ago (Whitehouse et al. Reference Whitehouse, Schulting, McClatchie, Barrat, McLaughlin, Bogaard, Colledge, Marchant, Gaffrey and Bunting2014; Woodbridge et al. Reference Woodbridge, Fyfe, Roberts, Downey, Edinborough and Shennan2014), followed by a decline in both population and human impact approximately 5500 years ago. It was not until late in the fifth millennium BP that population levels and associated land clearance were renewed. In continental Europe, the abundance of radiocarbon dates from the Neolithic—over 13 000—enable their use as a statistical proxy for population size through time, which demonstrates a recurrent pattern of population boom and bust following the introduction of farming into Europe (Shennan et al. Reference Shennan, Downey, Timpson, Edinborough, Colledge, Kerig, Manning and Thomas2013; Timpson et al. Reference Timpson, Colledge, Crema, Edinborough, Kerig, Manning, Thomas and Shennan2014). As more such finely resolved time-series data become available, abrupt changes may resolve themselves and we can perhaps determine if there were early warning signs in the lead up to these critical transitions (Scheffer et al. Reference Scheffer, Bascompte, Brock, Brovkin, Carpenter, Dakos and Held2009).

Between cycles of population growth and decline (Shennan et al. Reference Shennan, Downey, Timpson, Edinborough, Colledge, Kerig, Manning and Thomas2013; Timpson et al. Reference Timpson, Colledge, Crema, Edinborough, Kerig, Manning, Thomas and Shennan2014), population bottlenecks will have had a considerable impact on the genetic and cultural diversity of subsequent growth periods, with strong selective pressures acting on populations. Nutrition, disease resistance, climatic adaptations and group alliances will have affected survival rates during these population bottlenecks. Although Neolithic farmers were shorter than Mesolithic hunter-gatherers, had bad teeth and suffered from farming-related diseases (Jackes et al. Reference Jackes, Lubell and Meiklejohn1997; Holtby et al. Reference Holtby, Scarre, Bentley and Rowley-Conwy2012; Bickle & Fibiger Reference Bickle and Fibiger2014), the Neolithic still provided a selective advantage for those biologically evolved for adult lactose tolerance and carbohydrate digestion (Itan et al. Reference Itan, Powell, Beaumont, Burger and Thomas2009, Reference Itan, Jones, Ingram, Swallow and Thomas2010; Laland et al. Reference Laland, Odling-Smee and Myles2010). If dairy farming constituted its own evolutionary niche in the European Neolithic (Laland et al. Reference Laland, Odling-Smee and Myles2010; Gerbault et al. Reference Gerbault, Liebert, Itan, Powell, Currat, Burger, Swallow and Thomas2011; O’Brien & Laland Reference O’Brien and Laland2012; O’Brien & Bentley in press), lactose-tolerant lineages may have emerged as an increased proportion of the population. As a result, the modern European digestive system is partly a legacy of Neolithic dairy farming and cereal production. These ancient origins may yield insight into the breakdown of the insulin-regulatory system that underlies modern diabetes and obesity.

Ownership of food production fundamentally changed in the Neolithic; this has contemporary relevance as the world debates who ‘owns’ new, genetically modified crops (Eisenstein Reference Eisenstein2014). While the landscape of Mesolithic Europe was probably communal for hunting and gathering (e.g. boar, aurochs, deer, eggs, fish, shellfish, hazelnuts, medicinal plants), Neolithic farmers cultivated their crops (wheat, barley, peas, flax, opium poppy) in plots that were probably owned by specific households or lineages and intensively managed for long periods (Bogaard Reference Bogaard2004; Lüning Reference Lüning, Lüning, Frirdich and Zimmerman2005; Bogaard et al. Reference Bogaard, Strien and Krause2011). With the evolution of land ownership, the Neolithic was clearly a watershed phase in the origins of socio-economic inequality (Shennan Reference Shennan2011a; Pringle Reference Pringle2014). Although evidence for ascribed status among European Neolithic burials has been recognised for some time (e.g. Nieszery Reference Nieszery1995; Jeunesse Reference Jeunesse1997), new evidence is accumulating for differential access to resources. Ownership of cattle is likely to have signified wealth or status, and owners of large dairy herds probably had a selective advantage over smaller owners or non-owners. Wealth was therefore another likely factor in Neolithic survival, and livestock wealth usually predicts better reproductive success in terms of surviving children (e.g. Holden & Mace Reference Holden and Mace2003). Neolithic farmers also raised pigs, sheep and goats, but cattle produced valuable milk, as well as meat, hides and traction (Bogucki Reference Bogucki1993; Vigne & Helmer Reference Vigne and Helmer2007; Salque et al. Reference Salque, Bogucki, Pyzel, Sobkowiak-Tabaka, Grygiel, Szmyt and Evershed2013). If livestock herding was a hereditary specialisation (e.g. Bogucki Reference Bogucki1993), as suggested by isotopic studies of Neolithic skeletons (Bentley et al. Reference Bentley, Wahl, Price and Atkinson2008), then this selective advantage would have favoured wealthy, lactose-tolerant, cattle-owning lineages for generations, especially during population bottlenecks.

This amounts to a theory of niche construction among Neolithic dairy farmers (Brock et al. in press), and even though testing this hypothesis requires more prehistoric data than currently exists, each year brings increasingly sophisticated lines of evidence from Neolithic contexts (e.g. Skoglund et al. Reference Skoglund, Malström, Raghavan, Storå, Hall, Willerslev, Gilbert, Götherström and Jakobsson2012, Reference Skoglund, Malström, Omrak, Raghavan, Valdiosera, Günther, Hall, Tambets, Parik, Sjögren, Apel, Willerslev, Stora, Götherström and Jakobsson2014; Bollongino et al. Reference Bollongino, Nehlich, Richards, Orschiedt, Thomas, Sell, Fajkošová, Powell and Burger2013; Brandt et al. Reference Brandt, Haak, Adler, Roth, Szécsényi-Nagy, Karimnia, Möller-Rieker, Meller, Ganslmeier, Friederich, Dresely, Nicklisch, Pickrell, Sirocko, Reich, Cooper and Alt2013, Reference Brandt, Szécsényi-Nagy, Roth, Alt and Haak2015; Lazaridis et al. Reference Lazaridis, Patterson, Mittnik, Renaud, Mallick, Kirsanow and Sudmant2014). Some of the most detailed source material comes from the Neolithic village of Vaihingen, Germany, where palaeobotanical evidence, combined with an extensive analysis of ceramic decoration, suggests that different family lineages had access to different portions of land for cultivation or stock keeping (Bogaard et al. Reference Bogaard, Strien and Krause2011). Ceramic analysis across groupings of houses has led Strien (Reference Strien, Gronenborn and Petrasch2010) to argue that different ‘clans’ and lineages within Vaihingen were signalled by decoration on pottery and by lineage-specific craft techniques and raw material sources. Bogaard et al. (Reference Bogaard, Strien and Krause2011) propose that certain groups had access to more local, and presumably valuable, resource patches, whereas others had to travel farther afield for their subsistence needs. This is consistent with isotopic evidence from LBK sites from eastern France to Austria, which suggests that males buried with polished stone adzes had access to more local resources than those without (Bentley et al. Reference Bentley, Bickle, Fibiger, Nowell, Dale, Hedges, Hamilton, Wahl, Francken, Grupe, Lenneis, Teschler-Nicola, Arbogast, Hofmann and Whittle2012).

The tendency for cattle ownership to co-occur with patrilineal kinship (Holden & Mace Reference Holden and Mace2003) may also provide a framework for the archaeological, archaeogenetic and linguistic evidence favouring patriliny and livestock ownership in the European Neolithic (Bogucki Reference Bogucki1993; Cavalli-Sforza Reference Cavalli-Sforza1997; Eisenhauer Reference Eisenhauer, Eckert, Eisenhauer and Zimmermann2003; Bentley et al. Reference Bentley, Wahl, Price and Atkinson2008, Reference Bentley, Bickle, Fibiger, Nowell, Dale, Hedges, Hamilton, Wahl, Francken, Grupe, Lenneis, Teschler-Nicola, Arbogast, Hofmann and Whittle2012; Bogaard et al. Reference Bogaard, Strien and Krause2011). Patriliny would have been conducive to the growth of hereditary inequality over time, as males endeavoured to retain resource access within their lineages. These patrilineages may have become specialised stock-keepers and cultivators (Bogucki Reference Bogucki1993; Eisenhauer Reference Eisenhauer, Eckert, Eisenhauer and Zimmermann2003; Vigne & Helmer Reference Vigne and Helmer2007; Bentley et al. Reference Bentley, Wahl, Price and Atkinson2008). If women made pottery with lineage-dependent decorative styles learned from their mothers (Strien Reference Strien, Gronenborn and Petrasch2010), distinctive pottery design motifs may track the residential movement of women (Claßen Reference Claßen, Hofmann and Bickle2009).

In terms of Neolithic society and technology, the relatively low-level, fluctuating populations may have resulted in founder effects (Shennan Reference Shennan2000). The related archaeological discussion of population size and cumulative culture (Henrich Reference Henrich2004; Powell et al. Reference Powell, Shennan and Thomas2009; Shennan Reference Shennan2011b; Bentley & O’Brien Reference Bentley and O’Brien2012) is echoed by a new economic theory that twenty-first century populations will lead new technologies, which are capable of keeping pace with environmental demands (Malakoff Reference Malakoff2013). This, in turn, feeds back into the origins of inequality. Social memory, which was so resilient in Neolithic societies (Hodder & Cessford Reference Hodder and Cessford2004), may leave legacies in modern populations, such as the suggestion that millennia of rice agriculture in China brought about more holistic and collective social norms than the wheat-intensive Neolithic of Europe (Talhelm et al. Reference Talhelm, Zhang, Oishi, Shimin, Duan, Lan and Kitayama2014), or that norms associated with the prehistory of plough-use continue to affect modern fertility (Alesina et al. Reference Alesina, Giuliano and Nunn2011).

Insights into cooperation are demonstrated in how the exchange of foodstuffs mitigates the risk of seasonal uncertainty between different regional systems. If climate fluctuations undermined the stability of Neolithic societies (Gronenborn Reference Gronenborn2007), the disruption of exchange may have been as important as reduced productivity. These may provide important lessons for the twenty-first century regarding the effects of global warming on food supply (e.g. Battisti & Naylor Reference Battisti and Naylor2009), the increased likelihood of warfare (Hsiang et al. Reference Hsiang, Burke and Miguel2013) or a reduction in labour capacity (Dunne et al. Reference Dunne, Stouffer and John2013).

More generally, the detailed regional diversity of the material and cultural data from Neolithic Europe—including burial practices, pottery decorations, stone tools, craft techniques and raw material sources (Modderman Reference Modderman1988; Lüning et al. Reference Lüning, Kloos and Albert1989; Gronenborn Reference Gronenborn1999)—makes for an excellent testing ground of culture evolutionary process, including the neutral theory of ‘cultural drift’ (Shennan & Wilkinson Reference Shennan and Wilkinson2001; Bentley & Shennan Reference Bentley and Shennan2003), variations of which are now applied widely to contemporary phenomena, even Twitter (Gleeson et al. Reference Gleeson, Cellai, Onnela, Porter and Reed-Tsochas2014). Similarly, concepts of cumulative culture, tested in the Neolithic and before, underlie theories of modern innovation and the combinatorial possibilities of technology (Hausmann & Hidalgo Reference Hausmann and Hidalgo2011).

Archaeology is increasingly playing a significant role in these debates as we begin to learn from the early agricultural societies where so many trends began. The role of people in changing global environments and climate has become an issue of massive concern. Human diets have never been subject to closer scrutiny, and the links between genetic patterns and subsistence practices are becoming ever clearer. The consequences of a human population that is heading towards ten billion members are unknown. Will a new equilibrium be reached, or will we see a repeat of the boom-and-bust patterns visible in prehistory but on a much larger scale because of the strength of global interconnections? Are we doomed to ever-greater inequality as a result of the increased concentration of resources in fewer hands? The continuing relevance of the Neolithic has never been more apparent.