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Recent discoveries suggest a crucial cluster of biological & cultural innovations, probably in the millennia around 20,000 BP, and roughly in the southeast Asian region between the Yangtze and Mekong rivers. Among these were domestic dogs, vermin rats, and pottery.
Domestication of dogs & the dawn of pottery probably increased the time clans could remain in one place, perhaps from weeks to months & even, by sea shores, in permanent villages, leading to long-term food storage, which rats & other vermin could take advantage of.
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This was during the last glaciation of the ice ages, so the climate likely would have resembled today's northeast Asia more than today's southeat Asia.
Pottery stored food more securely against vermin (rats, mice, insects) than baskets. Pottery for storage & cooking appears to have been invented at least 20,000 years ago, just south of the Yangtze River:http://science.sciencemag.org/content/336/6089/1696 …
The brown rat seems to have started its career as vermin, eating food stored by & for humans, in the same general region & time period as where pottery first appeared & spread, suggesting the rise of vermin helped motivate the tech: http://biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2016/12/26/096800.full.pdf …http://science.sciencemag.org/content/336/6089/1696 …
All of today's domestic dogs descend from a common wolf ancestor that lived about 30,000 BP in southeast Asia. It was probably domesticated in that region around that time or a few millenia later: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4816135/pdf/cr2015147a.pdf …
The alarm system of barking dogs helped protect people in a long-term camp or village along with the food stored in that settlement. Dogs could provide an emergency food source & may have facilitated the movement of stored food by pulling sleds.
Coastal villages, which were likely numerous & permanent, & lived off of abundant fish & dense populations of littoral animals, have been largely lost to archaeology due to global warming & sea level rise at the end of the last glaciation.
The abundance of littoral food sources probably gave coastal peoples more motivation than inlanders to stay longer & store more food, so they may have been the original sources of this adaptation cluster (dogs, vermin, pottery). Archaeologists only have access to inland sites.
Long-term coastal settlements may have resembled those much later documented by travelers & ethnologists, for example the Nivkh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nivkh_people … the Kwakwakaʼwakw https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kwakwaka%CA%BCwakw … and the Yurok https://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2017/02/conflict-and-collectibles-among-yurok_87.html …
One must be cautious about the documented observations, however, since, especially in the case of the Kwakwakaʼwakw, they were often made after their cultures had been severely disrupted by European contact.
ht to the polymath Tim May for pointing out to me the likely importance of coastal villages as technological leaders during the millennia leading up to the dawn of agriculture.
I’ve recently read a great book about this: Domesticated: Evolution in a Man-Made World, by Richard C. Francis
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