Quote Originally Posted by Pannonian View Post
Agriculture, leading to an ever greater proportion of the population not engaged in producing food but instead producing services or inventing stuff. With writing becoming more complex to keep track of the food surpluses, it's meant that intellectual development can span generations. And just about everything else has collected momentum from these two developments. Food and knowledge.
I meant to present "agriculture, settlement and civilization" as a package, not to suggest that they are not directly related.

This package appears uniformly across the world within a Young Earth Creationist timeframe, indeed it fits very neatly with it. It makes a lot less sense with evolutionary theory, which posits that intelligent humans and proto-humans were roaming the earth for hundreds of thousands of years, during which time they became isolated from each other and were living in totally different environments with different wildlife, foodstuffs, potential crops, climates and demographic pressures - only to inexplicably develop the "package" of agriculture, settlement and civilization at almost once without any common evolutionary pressures.