I was reflecting on what I understand to be the common narrative of agrarian civilization--that we were at least semi-nomadic as a species until roughly 10-12K years ago, when some folk living around the Levant adopted agriculture on a societal level, either out of necessity or simple preference.
Of course, there are also plenty of Native American cultures that used agriculture, and some very complex, large-scale societies based on agriculture flourished at various times (Teotihuacan, the Aztec, Inca, Olmec, etc etc). Yet current understanding is that the last common ancestor between Native Americans and Eurasians lived roughly 20000 years ago.
To me, that would seem to suggest either (1) contact between those cultures and Africa/Europe/Asia [though wouldn't pre-Columbian contact be reflected in DNA studies?] or (2) that between the invention of controlled fire and the invention of agriculture, there was one (or more) essential (technological, cultural, genetic, ???) prerequisite to agrarian civilization; given that we were wandering around in our more or less current form 100K years ago, it seems highly unlikely that we'd spend the first 85% of that time not creating agrarian civilization, and then independently invent it in several places in the final 15% of that timeline--unless the first 85% of that time was spent slowly accumulating the necessary preconditions to that invention.
What are the popular schools of thought here? Did pottery (or something or multiple somethings like that) enable civilization?
Yes, agriculture was independently invented in the Americas.
To copy/paste an answer I gave previously
There's a number of factors that can contribute to this answer and the debate has raged on for 100 years. Factors such as population density and a dwindling food supply are often mentioned, but I am of the mind that it was the weather. Up until 12,000 years ago the climate around the world fluctuated from hot to cold and back again in intervals as small as a decade in some cases. This makes it extremely difficult to cultivate plants to grow in a certain climate if the climate is never stable. 12,000 years ago marks the Holocene and we have had a relatively stable climate that allowed people to settle down and begin farming. Whether that is, in fact, the case or not is still up for debate but the fact remains that people just were not able to farm before the Holocene.
To quote the source cited
"Might we not expect agriculture to have emerged in the last interglacial 130,000 years ago or even during one of the older interglacials? No archaeological evidence has come to light suggesting the presence of technologies that might be expected to accompany forays into intensive plant collecting or agriculture at this time. Anatomically modern humans may have appeared in Africa as early as 130,000 years ago, but they were not behaviorally modern. Humans of the last interglacial were uniformly archaic in behavior. Very likely, then, the humans of the last interglacial were neither cognitively nor culturally capable of evolving agricultural subsistence. However, climate might also explain the lack of marked subsistence intensification during previous interglacials. Ice cores from the thick Antarctic ice cap at Vostok show that each of the last four interglacials over the last 420,000 years were characteristic by a short, sharp peak of warmth rather than the 11,600 year long stable plateau of the Holocene. Further, the GRIP ice core suggests the last interglacial (130,000-80,000 BP) was more variable than the Holocene, although its lack of agreement with a nearby replicate for for this time period makes this interpretation tenuous. On the other than, the atmospheric concentration of C02 was higher in the three previous interglacials than during the Holocene, and was stable at high levels for about 20,000 years following the warm peak during the last interglacial. The highly continental Vostok site unfortunately does not record the same high-frequency variation in the climate as most other proxy climate records, even those in the southern hemisphere. Some northern hemisphere marine and terrestrial records suggest that the last interglacial was highly variable while other data suggest a Holocene-length period of stable climates ca. 127,000-117,000 BP. Better data on the high frequency part of the Pleistocene beyond the reach of the Greenland ice cores is needed to test hypotheses about events antedating the latest Pleistocene. Long marine cores from areas of rapid sediment accumulation are beginning to reveal the millennial scale record from previous glacial-interglacial cycles. At least the last five glacials have millennial-scale variations like the last glacial. The degree of fluctuations during previous interglacials is still not clear, but at least some proxy data suggest that the Holocene has been less variable than earlier interglacials."
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