Why can't we speed up the mesolithic?

I'm sure there are many reasons why sedentarism and agriculture took so long to come about, but they elude me so. For example, assuming an earlier desertification of Upper Egypt around 20-15k BCE, why wouldn't we see a Neolithic level of civilization by ~12k BCE?
I'm curious as to why many (I've encountered) dismiss the idea out of hand, and if there are any Mesolithic TLs.
 
Part of it is population density. When the population is thin enough the dispersed bands can move about after game without interfering with each other. It is after they cant find enough easy pickings that high intensity gathering & then cultivation develops. There are other components that develop as the population thickens, but I dont recall how those work.
 
It appears that agriculture got going within a few centuries of the end of the last glacial period. Glacial periods are not just colder, they also mean far more variable climates, with year-to-year swings in precipitation and average temperatures far greater than anything we have seen in the last 10,000 years. Agriculture requires climate stability, otherwise many or most of a year's crops will fail. Nobody is going to keep planting new crops if in 3 out of 5 years, the harvest fails, they might keep trying for a decade or two, but then give up.
 
It might have been theoretically possible for agriculture to have started at the beginning of the previous interglacial, but Hsapsap hadnt left africa then, AND we were still pretty new as a species. Whether eg the Denisovans or a yet undisccovered people could have pulled it off, i dont know, but i doubt it.

So i think you might need Hsapsap out of africa several 10s of thousands of years earlier. That, too, would be interesting, as the Toba bottleneck would have been very, very different, and we'd probably have far more surviving diversity.


OT3H, if agriculture stated 130kya or so, its entirely possible that humanity either reaches the stars or goes extinct about 20k years later. In any case the world would be unrecognizably different by now.
 
Dathi, do you mind explaining what exactly the Hsaphsap were?

I find pre-history to be fascinating, and googling it provides nothing (this thread is the first result).
 
Plus, you can't just decide to grow plants and make it so. It does take some time to domesticate plants. In terms of ease, wheat and barley were probably two of the easiest grains to domesticate, but we're still talking about centuries of trial and error. And as others have said, you need the incentive to do so; loss of game herds, stable climate, etc...
 
I've seen it used all those ways in the Anthrpogy and History classrooms. Maybe there is a firm usage now, but I saw no evidence of it back in my school days.
 
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