A lot happened in Europe after agriculture arrived from the Middle East to create civilizations which can't be contributed to the Middle East.
Have you not read what I wrote? For me, civilisations arose c. 4000 BCE with the first cities in Mesopotamia. That's 5,500 years after agriculture started in the Fertile Crescent. The two aren't connected. It's probably just a coincidence that both arose exactly in the same region.
IMO, culture isn't completely hereditary. In other words imo every aspect of a culture can't be traced to an ancestor. Therefore I don't like when people say the fertile crescent is THE birthplace of civilization. I think it's a simplistic way of thinking about the origins of later cultures and civilizations. I really doubt anyone can be accredited with being the main or only source for many later civilizations.
The birth or the cradle of civilisation means the place where it started. It doesn't mean that everything was suddenly invented in one place and spread from there! It's a long, constant evolution, but it needs a starting point. Ancient Europeans also played an important role in that evolution, with the development of metallurgy (based on present evidence it emerged in the Balkans), bronze working (North Caucasus), horse riding (Volga-Ural), war chariots (Volga-Ural)...
Other ancient people contributed to Minoan, Hittite, etc. civilizations and some aspects of their culture was invented by them and can't be attributed to an ancestor culture.
If you read carefully, I said that civilisations arose in the Middle East, not in the Fertile Crescent (that's only agriculture), and the Middle East includes Anatolia, the South Caucasus and Iran too.
That way of thinking about the ancient world is common I don't like it. I think too much credit is given to the famous Egyptians, Sumerians, Greeks, Romans. Kids in school get the impression they invented everything in existence and everyone in the ancient world lived in one of their civilizations.
If you checked my
list of inventions, you'd realise that ancient inventions have so little impact on modern life that they don't make the list. I listed separately the greatest contributions to the (modern) world of the ancient
Egyptians,
Greeks and
Romans, but I would be at a loss to find any invention still in regular use that originated in the Fertile Crescent. From Anatolia at least we have currency (coins), although that's almost obsolete too.
You don't seem to understand the concept of civilisation momentum. Civilisation may have arisen in Mesopotamia, but other civilisations sprang up all around in the Middle East, then the Eastern Mediterranean, etc. New people adopted the higher life styles of their neighbours, but usually also brought their own contributions. I don't know if this is because people of a certain language and culture in a given time in history have a limit to the amount of inventions they can spawn, or because people try to develop a civilisation based on some fixed cultural ideals, but it seems that after a while innovation just peters out and the once great civilisation becomes static and is overtaken by its neighbours, who have copied them but also added new concepts and innovations of their own. This is why the circle needs to keep widening all the time, so that new people with a different culture and fresh aspirations can bring new vigour to their adoptive civilisation. If it isn't neighbours, then it is foreign invaders. That works too. It happened many times in the Middle East in ancient times (the Hittites, Mitanni, Medes, etc were all Indo-European invaders).
You could imagine civilisation like a fire that spreads from a central point and which slowly extends outward in a growing circle. After a while, the point of origin is all burned out and the fire that is still burning forms a ring around it. That rings keep getting wider with time (= civilisation spreading further afield), but the burned out central area also gets bigger, unless someone renews the material in the middle (foreign invaders wishing to adopt the old civilisation but adding their own contribution).
This is why we see a sort of progressive displacement of the centre of gravity of western Eurasian civilisation from southern Mesopotamia to northern Mesopotamia to Anatolia to Greece to Italy to Frankia (France-Low Countries-Germany) to Britain to America. That's just the effect of civilisation being constantly adopted and improved by neighbours on the scale of centuries. It's not the same people. There is almost no genetic heredity, except for the intermarriages between neighbours or the conquest of the old civ by the new civ. It's mostly ideas spreading. That's why Western Civilisation can be said to have its roots in Mesopotamia, even if modern Westerners have little to do with ancient Sumerians.
I am surprised that I have to explain this to veteran members. That's the kind of thing that is part of compulsory education in secondary school in Belgium and many other European countries.
