10,000 years ago is the end of the last ice age, before which climates were shifted, sea levels were lower, and most of the land humans tend to like to live on (near sea level) are now deeply submerged.
We think agriculture and city-building started around that time, but it's possible we just haven't found older evidence because it was destroyed when the ice age ended and sea levels rose.
It seems incredibly arrogant to me to think that our ancestors, who were virtually identical to us much of those million+ years, required at-minimum hundreds of thousands of years to figure out what seeds are and how to make them grow. These are people who knew how to live off the land and were far more familiar with plants and animals than most of us could dream of being. These people invented astronomy, art, religion, clothes, tools, fire. They'd notice that plants produced seeds, that seeds wound up on the ground, and that new plants grew where the seeds fell.
I don't buy the atlantis "they're all under the sea" theory at all. We are expected to believe that they only built cities by the coast and none at all along rivers or round lakes? None of these civilizations spread to areas where the sea level has not risen so much? Far too contrived for my tastes.
Il flip your arrogance accusation around. These people developed agriculture and even cities tens of thousands of years ago, yet none of them managed to put together a sustainable survivable civilization? None of them managed to go from basic agriculture to even slightly more advanced agriculture that would have launched them on the track to specialization, even given hundreds of thousands of years in which to try? Why not? What was wrong with them?
To a hunter-gatherer, which is a nomadic lifestyle, cultivation in a fixed area for long enough to both sow and later reap a crop is not at all obvious.
I'm not completely convinced that they were genetically identical to ourselves, we used to evolve quite fast, and faster still after we developed agriculture.
Anyway, if you look at tribes native to the America, about all of them knew about agriculture (it's in their culture), but not all established an agricultural society. What we are calling "developing agriculture" probably is a much more complex phenomenon, with several different (near) contemporary developments, and probably none of them was learning that plants grow from seeds.
* Ok recent humans certainly were similar, and agriculture could probably have appeared a few thousand years earlier, I'm not sure we can extend that to hundreds of thousands, or maybe even tens of thousands.
We think agriculture and city-building started around that time, but it's possible we just haven't found older evidence because it was destroyed when the ice age ended and sea levels rose.
It seems incredibly arrogant to me to think that our ancestors, who were virtually identical to us much of those million+ years, required at-minimum hundreds of thousands of years to figure out what seeds are and how to make them grow. These are people who knew how to live off the land and were far more familiar with plants and animals than most of us could dream of being. These people invented astronomy, art, religion, clothes, tools, fire. They'd notice that plants produced seeds, that seeds wound up on the ground, and that new plants grew where the seeds fell.