responding to common objections to bible part 7

[Ironside]

Of course, people will only practice agriculture where it is efficient or necessary to do so. My point was that agriculture is something that came about quite suddenly on a global scale. Those different places where agriculture spread from must themselves have been spread across the world, because the many peoples had no contact with each other since agriculture began. Why, out of hundreds of thousands of years of human history, do people across the world all develop agriculture within just the last 10-13,000 years? I'm not overly concerned with the particulars of where and when, I'm talking generally with this massive timescale in mind.

What problem does agriculture (and animal husbandry) solve?
It improves the amount of food you can get from a region.
What issues does it have?
It costs a lot of spare time.
Think of it this way. Would you work twice as much if you got 3 times the money, but you can only spend as much as you do now? Of course not, that would be pointless.
So it only solves food shortages if the population density is high.

It does seem to take several thousands of years to go from hunter gathering to agriculture. So basically the problem is only solvable if you have a few thousand years when overpopulation is a consistant problem. You'll need population boom, crash, boom, crash. Not boom, crash, wait 400 years, boom, crash. Who remebers an oral source that haven't been relevant for 400 years?
So if a global event, like the end of an ice age, gives higher consistant, but unsustainable growth rates, then the problem would occur at about the same point globally. Add then that you'll need specific plants (and animals) fit for domestication and you'll get a pattern like this.

It's similar to cocurrent independent inventions. They have the added factor of shared starting information, but they still have the same principle that when the problem occurs and its solution is possible, it won't take long for similar, yet different solutions to appear around the same time.

Well, as with the advent of agriculture, why did this phenomena suddenly occur across all peoples in all situations, even with they were completely cut off from each other and living in completely different environments? And anyway I don't think this "creative explosion" is directly relevant since why does it take another 40,000 years across all peoples and all situations before farming and civilization suddenly become apparent?

It didn't. That one seems to have spread. And progressed. It's kind of a starting leap (it's the start of the Upper Paleolithic).

Its relevance is that to solve this kind of multigenerational problem you'll need to have a culture that allows for its invention. The average human are poor on advanced inventing, but good at understanding it after its been invented. Time jump a bunch of Romans and it'll probably take them fairly little effort to make new cellphone models with proper education and training. But that fact doesn't change that the Romans didn't invent the cellphone.
So the timeframe is how long you had a culture that allowed for the invention of agriculture, not how long you had a people capable of doing agriculture after it has been invented.