system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Are there any theories regarding why agriculture (or civilization) emerged independantly multiple times recently?

As I understand things, the human species has existed in its modern state for more than 100k years, and for almost all of our history, we've been hunter-gatherers and then suddenly, like a cambrian explosion, settlement and farming emerged a few times almost at once. Is it simply that there hasn't been an epoch more conducive to the prerequisite series of events for these developments than the holocene?
gpt
David Christian of Big History suggests that it was a result of Earth coming out of the last ice age about 10.000 years ago. Humans for a large part appears to have had all the technologies necessary for agriculture, but simply didn't need to. Increasing in population put pressure on humans to increase the amount of energy extracted from the same area of land.  In fact it appears things like living standards and life expectancy went *down*. But those who did go into agriculture started to simply out compete surrounding hunter gathers in shear numbers. When your population density is more than an order of magnitude higher, war becomes almost trivial.

The rest is, as we say, history.