Delay/advance Agricultural Revolution 10,000 years

This one may be a challenge. The AR began in several places within a millennium or so, then in the Western Hemisphere a couple millennia later. But without changing basic climate, is there a plausible TL that matches the Orion's Arm website in 2012 instead of 12569, or one where the world is still in the Neolithic?
 
As far as I recall, there are indications of incipient agriculture in the more recent interstadials, which however did not persist when glacial conditions returned.

Since agriculture appears to have developed within a few centuries of climate conditions changing to allow it, I think we can safely assume that once "modern humans" emerged, the only thing holding agriculture back was the glacial climate conditions. Not so much colder temperature, which can be compensated for by simply moving toward the equator, but the huge year-to-year variability in temperature and rainfall which made it impossible to predict if a given crop would even survive for a growing season. If only one in four years allow a crop to be produced, I cannot see agriculture taking hold.

So in OTL agriculture developed as early as climate conditions allowed, with evidence of proto-agriculture during recent interstadials that did not survive the climate returning to glacial conditions. Earlier agriculture would depend upon some region possessing stable climate conditions during the generally unstable glacial climates. I do not know enough to say if such regions existed.
 
Bølling-Allerød interstadial

The Bølling-Allerød interstadial was a warm and moist interstadial period that occurred during the final stages of the last glacial period. This warm period ran from c. 14,700 to 12,700 years before the present. It began with the end of the cold period known as the Oldest Dryas, and ended abruptly with the onset of the Younger Dryas, a cold period that reduced temperatures back to near-glacial levels within a decade.

In some regions, a cold period known as the Older Dryas can be detected in the middle of the Bølling-Allerød interstadial. In these regions the period is divided into the Bølling oscillation, which peaked around 14,500 BCE, and the Allerød oscillation, which peaked closer to 13,000 BCE.

In the middle east, the pre-agricultural Natufian settled around the east coast of the Mediterranean to exploit wild cereals, such as emmer and two-row barley. In the Allerød they would begin to domesticate these plants.

Natufian culture

The Natufian communities are possibly the ancestors of the builders of the first Neolithic settlements of the region, which may have been the earliest in the world. There is some evidence for the deliberate cultivation of cereals, specifically rye, by the Natufian culture, at the Tell Abu Hureyra site, the site for earliest evidence of agriculture in the world. Generally, though, Natufians made use of wild cereals. Animals hunted include gazelles.

The origins and spread of agriculture and pastoralism in Eurasia

Pages 187-194 discuss the possible start of cultivation of early cereals during the Bølling-Allerød interstadial.

Climate Change and the Origin and Development of Rice Cultivation in the Yangtze River Basin, China

The forest hunter-gatherers of the middle Yangtze River basin, who were the first to invent pottery and led a sedentary lifestyle, may have begun to cultivate rice during the Bølling-Allerød interstadial global warming period. The earliest rice cultivation may have dated back to 14 000 calibrated (cal.) years before present (YBP). The global warming at 9000 cal. YBP in the early Holocene brought the development of the rice cultivation to the middle Yangtze River basin.
 
We discussed something similar to this in another forum a few months ago. I pointed out that the key to civilization isn't farming so much as it is the ability to store food and retrieve the calories from it as needed. Once you get reasonably secure long-term storage of grain (or some other food) and a way to quickly extract the calories, farming seems to naturally follow if there is stable enough weather and good enough food crops to make it worth the effort.

Secure storage is one bottleneck. Baskets are wonderful, but until you have pottery you probably don't have storage secure against rats and mice. Processing the food is another bottleneck. A lot of grains require grinding or sprouting, with grinding being the preferred prep because it can be closer to on-demand. It's possible that development of tools formed by grinding rocks into shape rather than using flaking techniques played a role in making some kinds of grain more usable after storage.
 
I would concur, an essential step to full agriculture is being able to time-shift. ie, to store and allocate appropriate resources from times and locations of plenty to times and locations of scarcity.

This implies technologies for both processing - ie, freezing, drying, salting, smoking, powdering, etc., and actual storage which involves both weatherproofing and protection from mold, rot, insects and vermin.

Semi-sedentary hunter/gatherer cultures do this. For instance, Cree fishing communities up and down the Nelson and Churchill river would catch large fall harvests of fish, dry and smoke them and remain in a stable location for the winter. In extremely productive fisheries, a community might hold a location year round. The Andean cultures seem to have originated on fish protein.
 
Even without a crop the Kooris of south western Victoria made wiers and dams and set up nets for eels, which they smoked in hollowed-out trees for export over long distances. What`s more, making a permament wetland even in dry summers, allowed them to hunt without having to wander around to stalk game, the game came to their settlements to drink the water they stored in their dams and weirs.

People aren`t stupid, they`ll do whatever they have to to build a nice comfy house and get a regular supply of food. If this means building weirs to trap and smoke eels, or plant and harvest emmer wheat then so be it. It sure as hell beats stalking (and being gored by) a mammoth, and then figthing off the sabre tooths when you do manage to get one. Bugger that for a way to earn a crust! The second an easier way presents itself they`ll be all over it like a rash. God bless the inherent laziness of homo sapiens.
 
An interesting point of view:

Actually, we are already heading toward an other one of these paradigm shifts.. The humanity has gone trough 4 major paradigm shifts since it started, namely Tools and Fire (~300K y ago), Agriculture and animal domestication (~25K-10K y ago), emancipation of the masses (in the 1300 AD) and the industrialization revolution, globalization and medical advances in 1950. Each shift was accompanied with an increase of the world wide population caused by humanity improved productivity and changes in de way the society operate.

&

The singularities are happening fairly regularly but at an increasing rate, every 500 to 1000 billion man-years (the total sum of the worldwide population over time). The baby boom of the 1950 is about 200 Billion man-years ago.

This is from comments on the "technological singularity" found accross the vast expanses of the Net.

The thoughts into which these consideration lead to are ( without of course to disregard the environmental factors!!! ), that these "paradigm shifts" are emergence of the general cumulative trends of the factors which amplify eachother into positive feedback: population number, knowledge, volume of economy, populational communications horizons... ... In that sense emergence of agriculture is such cumulative phenomenon. Yes, the conditions it to appear are numerous accross the millennia since the Man exists, but the conditions the trend to become dominant are rather internal for the state of the species, rather than external, i.e. environmental.

Thus, "why not earlier?" = not enough resources in humanity to "fund" the shift.

See also Brad DeLong's population and economic growth retropolation: http://econ161.berkeley.edu/TCEH/1998_Draft/World_GDP/Estimating_World_GDP.html
 
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