I'm watching a documentary on the history of early civilization, and a lot of emphasis is being placed on Mesopatamia's move towards agriculture and animal domestication as a necessary seed for large-scale settlement. The narrator keeps implying that wheat and barley were the bedrock that civilization was founded on, and that without the environmental confluences that allowed these grains to flourish in the valley (and some amount of cosmic luck), we might still be tribal.
But, I know rice in the Yangtze valley, and maize in Central Mexico, were of equal import to the economies and civilizations there as grain was in the Mesopotamian valley.
I've seen maps that place Neolithic revolutions on a timeline, generally moving east from Mesopotamia across several thousand years, but these maps don't seem to indicate whether this knowledge moved with human migration patterns, or whether the people settled these areas and then independently developed agricultural practices.
I guess this is a big question, as the fertile crescent is often called the Cradle of Civilization, but... Were there multiple cradles? Or can all this really be traced to one region?
This isn't going to be a very thorough answer but simply put, there were multiple cradles.
Considering certain human populations like those in the Americas and Papua New Guinea were isolated from others such as Mesopotamia and China because of oceans making it difficult or near impossible to spread to information about their agriculture. There were also differences in continents, Mesopotamia and China were different cores and so were Mexico and South America. This is largely due to distance and geographical boundaries such as mountains, deserts and jungles making communication difficult to say the least.
I'd also like to emphasise that different cradles grew different things, for Mesopotamia it was wheat, barley and rye, in the Yellow River Valley it was rice and I believe as well (correct me if I'm wrong) millet and soy. So it's not like all agriculture was the same everywhere.
I hope this answered your question, I haven't answered much before so please forgive me if I stated any misinformation myself. My main sources were some basic knowledge of early agriculture and Why The West Rules For Now by Ian Morris.