Is there an accepted explanation for multiple independent "cradles of civilization"?

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Accepted answer

I also believe the answer is "no". It sure is tempting to put forth one's own theories here, but I'm unaware of any one that is generally accepted.

I will point out one thing though: That chart you posted is essentially a chart of literacy. If you use the dates there, you are asking a question about the discovery of writing in various places, not the "Neolithic revolution" itself (which was more about animal and plant domestication).

One thing we can say for sure about literacy is that societies quite happily emulate other ones when they see a useful innovation in writing. So it is generally thought that writing systems emerging so close together in Egypt and Mesopotamia is no coincidence (what is under dispute is who was first). The Indus Valley was in trade contact with Egypt, so in theory their literacy could have been borrowed too. However, the other 3 on the list were probably independent inventions.

I can't resist pointing out some interesting timing with domestication though. The current inter-glacial period we are living in started about 11,700 years ago. The earliest evidence we have of agriculture? Also 11,000 years ago.

Of course that's just (circumstantial) evidence of a correlation, not a causation. However, this is certainly what it would look like if mankind was poised for this genetically, and the Neolithic breakthrough was merely awaiting weather conditions that made agriculture a relatively worthwhile effort.

Likewise, the appearance of multiple independent writing systems in densely-habitated agricultural areas all over the globe looks an awful lot like writing is just something a society naturally has a good chance of developing, once it reaches a certain size.

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The Sahara Dried Up

While I agree with TED both that there probably isn't an accepted reason, and that the end of the Ice Age is likely related to the birth of agriculture, I do think it's worth mentioning a potentially more proximate event.

The most recent wet Sahara period began around 12,500BC and ended around 4,000BC, which is remarkably close to the start of urban civilizations in Eurasia.

The Sahara periodically receives long periods (1,000s of years) of rain, where it transforms into savanna, followed by even longer periods (10,000s of years) of drought and desertification. There's a theory that during these wet periods, people and animals from sub-Sarahan Africa and North Africa would expand into the new savanna, and then the return of the dry period would cause large migrations as the land became less and less productive.

So it's possible that climate change in Africa caused wave of migration that jump started urban civilization in Eurasia by pushing proto-civilizations in Egypt and Mesopotamia over some population threshold.

The wet Sahara Wikipedia link explicitly makes the above claim, but I don't know how widely accepted it is.

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