Earlier quoted context omitted.
> b) The transition to agriculture (which triggered the technology explosion) took a long period of luck, including groups of people living in a floodplain for a long enough time to breed plants that were suitable for agriculture. Note that this was an extremely rare thing, in that it probably only happened ~4-5 times in human history and spread everywhere else. The accepted origins of agriculture keep fluctuating, b…
Göbekli Tepe actually proves that highly organized cities are a lot older than agriculture itself. More broadly, there's a lot of circumstantial evidence that civilization - at least as in highly developed cities allowing for trade, exchange, production of material goods and even creation of impressive stone monuments - is in fact older than was previously thought. Many of those unknown civilizations may been affecte…
Another potential issue is that some of our understanding of Paleolithic societies comes from observation of modern hunter-gatherer societies, which exist in a context where they've been pushed off of any agriculturally productive land. I'll point out that cereal crops require substantial processing to be made edible, unlike things like berries or meat which can be eaten at point of collection, so... if cereal crops are the founder crops of agriculture, we had to know how to process them to edibility well before modern agriculture gets under way. When did that happen, and how widespread was it compared to other food sources?