Quote Originally Posted by a completely inoffensive name View Post
From the pattern of agriculture emergence, your theory would state that these humans came from India since that was the first area that developed agriculture. Do we see the genetic evidence to back this up? Also, what you just listed fits my idea as long as I stipulate to leave out the Americas who I would consider to be concurrently developing agriculture at the same time as a mere coincidence (just as many scientific discoveries are made by two unconnected people at the same time). From Egypt, India and China their interactions with nomadic peoples slowly influenced these nearby hunter-gathers/pastoral group to convert to agriculture over time.

If you want my real opinion on this matter. I think the truth is a mixture of optimum climate conditions that allowed for low tech agriculture (much of what is now desert was once grassland and fertile) as well as what I described above. Certain areas which developed later as you mentioned could not have been completely ignorant of agriculture unless they were truly isolated (the level of long distance trade even back in ancient times is surprising, or at least it was to me in the textbooks I have read). North America consists mostly of harsh desert/flatlands, or cold tundra or extremely plentiful forests that probably encourage hunter-gatherer lifestyles due to the abundance of natural resources in (what is considered today) Eastern US. Australia is mostly desert and would be hard to achieve, so again no surprise it happened later there.

When we are talking about timelines which span across multiple millenniums, I think it is important to keep in mind the generations of contact which occur within a 1,000 years.
If it was just a case of two independent developments in Asia-Africa-Europe and the Americas, I agree it could be a coincidence. But there were nine of these independent developments across the world. According to this article (which admits this presents something of a conundrum) these are the "Fertile Crescent, China, Mesoamerica, Andes/Amazonia, eastern United States, Sahel, tropical West Africa, Ethiopia and New Guinea".

My view of what happened is that a people with extensive knowledge of agriculture, seafaring, urban development etc first settled in the Middle East and then settled the world over a period of about 1,000 years. Regarding the dates I gave earlier - I wouldn't read too much into a variation of 1,000 years - the figures are extremely speculative since radiocarbon dating is not far short of useless for absolute dating - its use lies in relative dating which is used alongside much less precise theories to come up with dates. Their significance IMO is in showing a very sudden appearance of civilization across the whole world - something that doesn't fit with evolutionary models for human development.

Have you ever come across any of David Rohl's books or documentaries? He is a secular archaeologist and is (was?) Britain's top expert on the ancient Middle East - he does an excellent job at pointing out how flimsy current scientific interpretations of these ancient times are, as well as highlighting systematic problems in the scientific community, and in particular its failure to harmonize findings from different disciplines as well as its refusal to appreciate the value of literary sources for cultural reasons (eg, the perceived faith v science conflict which means even attempting to reconcile archaeological findings with literary accounts is a career-wrecker).

If you want a secular and serious critique of much of modern science and history, then he's your man.