Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Neolithic Revolution, also called the First Agricultural Revolution, was the wide-scale transition of many human cultures from nomadic and semi-nomadic hunter-gathering to agriculture, settlement, cross-group organisation, population growth, and increasing social differentiation. V. Gordon Childe named it in his 1936 book Man Makes Himself.
The Neolithic Revolution began in Mesopotamia about 11,700 years ago, after the last Ice Age ended and the climate became warmer. From there it expanded by migration, a process called Neolithisation, reaching northern Europe around 5500 BCE.
Neolithic farming diets were higher in carbohydrates but lower in fibre, micronutrients, and protein, causing shorter stature, higher infant mortality, and more infectious disease. Average European height fell from 178 cm for men and 168 cm for women to 165 and 155 cm, and did not recover until the twentieth century.
Daniel Zohary identified the Neolithic founder crops, stressing wheat, barley and rye, with flax, peas, chickpeas, bitter vetch and lentils coming a little later. Selective breeding of cereal grasses began with emmer, einkorn and barley around 9000 BP.
Centres of the Neolithic Revolution emerged independently in West Asia, northern and southern China, New Guinea, the Americas, and three areas of Africa, the Ethiopian highlands, the Sahel and West Africa. Maize was domesticated in the Americas beginning about 7000 BCE, and rice in the Yangtze basin between 13,500 and 8,200 years ago.
As societies settled, pathogens jumped between farmers and livestock, producing new illnesses such as influenza, smallpox, and measles. Over roughly 10,000 years of close animal contact, Eurasians and Africans grew resistant, and when contact came, 90 percent or more of many American populations died from European and African diseases before recorded contact with colonists.