<p>This paper represents an effort to ‘unpack’ the Neolithic as an umbrella concept for the pivotal developments in world prehistory that include the origins of agriculture and the emergence of village life—both within the Eurasian context in which the concept was originally framed and outside of it. It begins with a brief history of the term, focusing in particular on V. Gordon Childe’s Neolithic Revolution. The paper next considers recent research for the roll-out of the multi-faceted components of Childe’s concept in Southwest Asia, with a particular focus on sedentism, resource management, domestication, agriculture, and the social/ideological underpinnings of village life. After a brief review of similar developments in China, Japan, Eastern North America, Mesoamerica, and the Pacific Northwest, the continued relevance of the term <i>Neolithic</i> is considered. Rather than proposing a new term (while recognizing the difficult connotations of a term grounded in a distinctly Europeanist perspective of the 19th and early twentieth century), a ‘rebranding’ of the Neolithic is proposed in a flexible and open-ended way that sets general parameters for discussion and comparison.</p>