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I've been picturing for a while an interesting scenario in which the ball starts rolling for the development of agriculture and large-scale urban civilization slightly earlier than in OTL, on the order of a few thousand years. I see several subtle and interesting consequences of such a development, one of the more intriguing to me being the potential for a powerful early center along the Yellow Nile, a former tributary of the Nile which flowed down from the Ouaddai highlands of Chad from ca. 8000 to 1000 BCE. If its rise is timed just well enough during the period when the river was strong and the Sahara was a wetter grassland, the Yellow Nile and its valley could have been a potent agricultural region. IOTL we basically just missed it.

What are some other things that early civilization "just missed" that could have proven interesting in its development had it occurred not long earlier?
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