Why did advanced civilizations all arrive within a few thousand years of each other?

by Trumps_DNM_Account

I started thinking about this specifically in relation to the pre Colombian cultures in America versus the cultures of the Fertile Crescent. Although culture and civilization is believed to have developed thousands of years earlier in the Middle East, this is still surprisingly close in time considering how long anatomically modern humans have been around.

Is this just coincidence or are there potentially other factors like climate involved?

Swagiken

The advent of farming seems to have occurred in response to climactic change as the ice age period came to an end, in most places this led to two things which encouraged the development of agriculture.

  1. the climactic change altered what plants could live in what places, and this in turn impacted the viability of hunting and gathering. This is more of a push towards agriculture.
  2. new opportunities arose to grow plants due to better growing seasons. There is also somewhat a third factor, this being the age of human proto-civilization itself. Humans had virtually identical selective pressures on them wherever they lived, and tribal society and brain capacity had evolved to the point where an agricultural society was even possible to maintain.

Put simply, it was just our time. We pretty quickly developed agriculture everywhere that we could with the tech of the time, and the ideas spread and developed from there.