Possible but difficult.I was wondering, could a civilization or multiple civilizations have developed cities and agriculture before the Neolithic revolution around 10,000 BC but were wiped out and did not leave enough ruins behind?
I'm just using a city as the marker.Do you consider the Cave paintings in Southern France evidence of civilization?
Do you consider that the Neanderthal was the first humanoid-like species that buried their dead -instead of the cannibalism of the previous existing species. (The Homo Erectus bones often show evidences of being de-fleshed, cooked, or in the case of one skull boiled until it burst where on it is likely the Homo Erectus ate the contents of the burst skull). The Neanderthal was usually burred with grave goods such as tools, food, red ochre, and fresh flowers. Some have theorized that the Neanderthal might have had the primitive inklings of religion (or the concept of an afterlife). The problem is the idea of Neanderthal religion is still controversial among most scholars in the field of ancient human study. So if Neanderthal religion theory is true - that is a case for "civilization".
DIT:
If you're talking a few thousand years before the "start" of agriculture (whenever that would be), then yes, it's possible that agriculture has been going on for a bit longer than we think. Genetic analysis of a number of crop plants indicates a long period (potentially 10,000 years but the time period is fuzzy) of "semi-domestication" prior to what most people would call farming (and most of this period would have been mild unconscious selection by humans). But earlier than that? There's really no evidence for it, and as I said above, the lack of evidence is telling.
If look at the climate at the time such civilisation would be much limited where it could exist. The climate was drier and the sea level lower. So much of the prime real eastate in the early neolithic age was likely pretty worthless. But instead we had fertile low land valleys and coastland in flooded areas today.
The Persian Gulf Valley: We could very well have had a early neolithic civilisation there. If that's the case we could easily imagine that the refugees from this flooded valley created the first post-Ice Age agricultural civilisations.
But it's also not impossible that early than that human have experimented with agriculture only to give it up again. While some claim that the Toba Eruption wasn't as disasterous as earlier believed, even a mild one could have resulted in a population decrease, which resulted in a experiments in agriculture being given up or variation in climate making another early adopters give up on agriculture.
Problem: The climate was also much more unstable. It makes developing food producing strategies more difficult because they may not pay off reliably and leave you short of food. I think you'd need a less weather sensitive main food source than agriculture.
Yes it's also why I doesn't find it unlikely that a Ice Age agricultural culture could have dwelled there.You know, genetic analysis of ancient human remains from around the Persian gulf has given some very interesting results. It is beginning to seem quite probable that it was the homeland of a basal population that split off the out of Africa group almost immediately, long before the other non-African groups split, and remained isolated until the end of the Ice Age.
Current thinking is coming round to no Toba bottleneck effect. The current (march) issue of Journal of Human Evolution has a good piece on it.
Doesn't meltwater also require a stable climate to reduce flash flooding and landslides?The benefit of Gulf Valley are the fact that it didn't depend on rain, but would have gotten its water from the spring and summer melt in Anatolian and Iranian mountains. This would create a much more stable source of water. But would also have made it next to impossible to move out of the valley.
That's a very good point!Or the "civilization" is based upon fishing and gathering, rather than agriculture. As were a small smaller civilizations along the pacific coastline of south america. Any traces of it would of course be hidden by the rising of the sea levels...
Doesn't meltwater also require a stable climate to reduce flash flooding and landslides?
Stable climate is about regular and predictive weather not just clement weather.
But those were all regular, in a stable climate such things are regular and bad seasons rare. In an unstable climate you don't know what the seasons will be, the wet and dry years are unpredictable so you don't know when the floods are or how big.It needs plants (trees mostly) which can work against erosion. Also when talk about stable climate, it means you expect there won't be a year without rain, but floods remove the need for rain, a example of this kind of area would be Egypt, where annual flood flooded the fields, and ensure nutrients arrived to the fields. Another example are southern Iraq one of the most fertile region in the Middle East and it get very little rain, but instead get the water through annual flood from the Iranian and Anatolian mountains.
But those were all regular, in a stable climate such things are regular and bad seasons rare. In an unstable climate you don't know what the seasons will be, the wet and dry years are unpredictable so you don't know when the floods are or how big.
To paraphrase Sir Pterry, history defines a civilised culture as one which can support historians.Depends on what you define as "civilization". Cultures an societies certainly existed.