Industrial revolution comparable to neolithic revolution?

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I am currently reading the first Volume of Heinrich August Winkler's History of the west.
In world history there was only one revolution that had a comparable impact on all levels of human life: The transition from hunter cultures to settled farmer societies in the younger stone age, roughly 10.000 years ago
(roughly translated from my German version?

I find this idea really intruiging, but at the same time it rather bugs me that supposedly there wasn't any other change in human society in that scale.

Sooo opinion on this?
 
I remember three years ago when I was a sophomore in high school I had to write a paper comparing the two revolutions. It was so long ago but from what I can remember both revolutions marked transitions in the main way (most) people made their living. The neolithic from a hunting based food source to an agrarian based food source and the industrial from an agricultural economy to an industrial economy. I think we're undergoing another revolution of this source today with the fairly recent inventions of the internet and digital appliances,
 
Part of the IR's enormous significance is also that the change between say, AD 600 to AD 1600, while very real and very significant, is over a long period of development and stumbling back and forth - not something where within a human lifetime things suddenly changed irrevocably.
 
It certainly looks like that, but I'd argue it is simply too early to tell. If the industrial revolution sticks, then yes. But it had s barely had three centuries anywhere, more like one in most of the world. In terms of longue duree, it's still a blip.
 
It certainly looks like that, but I'd argue it is simply too early to tell. If the industrial revolution sticks, then yes. But it had s barely had three centuries anywhere, more like one in most of the world. In terms of longue duree, it's still a blip.

True.
Give it a few centuries then we'll see. If we manage to crack space then we're in the safe zone and we can safely say that yes, it was a pretty major revolution.
 
Even if we don't, the difference between 1800 and 1900 is far more significant than between 1700 and 1800 - arguably that between 800 and 1800.
 
It certainly looks like that, but I'd argue it is simply too early to tell. If the industrial revolution sticks, then yes. But it had s barely had three centuries anywhere, more like one in most of the world. In terms of longue duree, it's still a blip.

I completely agree that 2 or 3 centuries is too short a period to evaluate the long term longevity and permanence of the industrial revolution and all of the social and cultural trends that go along with it. But, to be a devil's advocate, I would suggest there are several factors that would argue that it is a true "revolution" more than the so-called neolithic revolution:

1. The rise of sedentary societies based on agriculture did not occur over night, and it took millenia to become a more or less worldwide phenomena. Even today, there are parts of the world in which agriculturally-based sedentary life is the exception, rather than the norm. Because of technological innovations in communication and transportation made possible by the industrial revolution, the effects and products of industrialization spread very quickly throughout the world, even to peoples who were not a part of the preceeding agrarian revolution

2. In most places, sedentism arose from indigeneous resource exploitation practices and local resources that were already being utilized in a less intensive manner. Industrialization created a whole host of new resources and exploitation patterns not even imagined or feasible before, and because the industrial revolution occurred in only one small part of the earth and then gave that area the technological ability and power to spread its influence and dominance over the entire globe almost instantaneously, archaeologically speaking, rapid cultural dislocations in many places were not only revolutionary, but radically revolutionary.

3. Even if the industrial revolution doesn't last (perhaps because it contains the seeds of its own destruction in climate change, etc), it has had a truly radical effect on global human population and the earth itself. If I were an alien archaeologist looking through earth's archaeological record, the "neolithic revolution" would appear as the gradual evolution and spread of agriculture, sedentism, urbanization, and state-level societies in many areas. The industrial revolution would appear as a sudden event that was superimposed in most of the globe, marked by the nearly instantaneous introduction of whole artifact complexes with no local antecedents, a radical increase in human population and intensive resource exploitation, creating a demonstrable impact on global biodiversity and climate. Even if this horizon then disappeared after 500-1000 or so years, I would interpret it as a much more "revolutionary" era in earth's history than the development and spread of agriculture.
 
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