In my recollection of high school history classes, human civilization is largely built on agriculture. Once humans had crops, the incentive to live in communities rose significantly. Sure, you can assert that “humans are social beings” (whatever that specifically means), but humans need food to carry out basic biological functions, which is decidedly less abstract.
Through this lens, the advent of agriculture is immensely significant to human development. Indeed, the beginning of agriculture is hypothesized to have begun around 12,000 years ago, but the very interesting detail is that agriculture is thought to have begun in eleven different geographical regions around the same time.
Wild grains were collected around 104,000 years ago, and the people who lived at the Ohalo II archaeological site near the Sea of Galilea appear to have cultivated edible grass around 21,000 BCE, but the earliest evidence of farming crops in a (somewhat) conventional sense comes from around 9500 BCE. From then, evidence emerges of the eight Neolithic founder crops – emmer wheat, einkorn wheat, hulled barley, peas, lentils, bitter vetch, chickpeas, and flax. Evidence of these was found in the Levant, a subregion of West Asia along the Eastern Mediterranean that forms part of the Middle East (roughly Cyprus and the Middle East region bordering the Mediterranean aka The Levantine Sea). Prior to agriculture, humans were [hypothesized to have been] hunter-gatherers. Correspondingly, the advent of agriculture seems to be linked to the advent of civilization, quite loosely-speaking.
Pigs are thought to have been domesticated around 11,000 years ago (~9000 BCE), followed by sheep. After that, cattle are suspected to have been domesticated near Turkey and India around 10,500 years ago. As you might imagine, those things are challenging to quantify. All of this is more evidence that humans don’t need to eat meat, if you ask me.
So, let’s recap: the Earth is around 4.6 billion years old. For a lot of that time, it was a proto-planet. For hundreds of millions of years, there was like _nothing_. Then, about 12,000 years ago, we got farming. From there, it was off to the races………..very slowly.