How long did humans live a nomadic lifestyle prior to settling the first villages? What were the technological breakthroughs or catalysts that allowed them to stop living a nomadic life?
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They can stop being nomadic if there is one thing – a steady supply of food (and water). Now, the major revolution was the agricultural revolution – figuring out “ok, instead of gathering all these plants in the wild, I’m going to grow them myself and I wont have to search so far, thus saving lots of energy.”
But we eat more than just plants. So if there was plentiful fish in the steams, we could build little fish weirs that could catch them, and if there was lots of game, we could hunt. If that + foraging was enough and stayed that way year round, people settled down even without agriculture.
And, of course, once you settled down, you could start looking at doing something like planting some fruit trees or grains.
there was also domestication – sheep and goats were domesticated around 11,000 years ago; chickens around 8,000 years ago (although the chickens didn’t spread to the Mediterranean until around 1000 BC or so)
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