Modern technology early

Gan

Banned
I know I posted a similar thread before, but it was too vague and it's been awhile.

Can mankind, without ASB help, reach the same technology levels of the 20th century to early 21st? Using the following list of POD to end date, which would most likely work?

5000 BCE - 1000 BCE
4000 BCE - 500 BCE
3000 BCE - 1 CE
2000 BCE - 500 CE
1000 BCE - 1000 CE
1 CE - 1500 CE

Aside from technology, how much would you have to change for it to be similar to 21st century civilization in terms of morals and ethics? Do those things come with the technology?

Which societies are most likely to pull it off? Egyptians, Chinese, Greeks, Romans, Persians? Anyone else? A new one that didn't exist OTL? Can they keep it to themselves and use it to dominate the world, or is it likely to spread globally as OTL?

If it looks promising I may attempt a TL once I have more time to spare.
 
The only way I can think of to achieve this is to set the starting date of world agriculture earlier. Assuming we can't just make it so the ice ages end earlier or don't happen at all, we would have to come up with a scenario in which crops and animals are domesticated at a faster rate than in OTL, and perhaps in more locations. I can say for sure, though, that with a POD this far back (i.e. 8,000 to 10,000 years before present), no culture recognizable from OTL would exist. Human migrations, language evolution and differentiation, and religious systems are all just too sensitive to random chance and small changes in local events that virtually everything except general human physical characteristics and general subsistence patterns - both of which are mostly determined by environment and climate - would be butterflied away. For instance, there may be a "China" in this TL, but it would not be called that, nor would it be inhabited by Chinese-speakers, even if it is inhabited by people we would identify physically as "East Asians". The Chinese language, as we know it from OTL, would simply not exist. The same goes for virtually all other human languages and cultures that we would know from OTL.
 
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