No one contemplating the cave art at Chauvet (the oldest of which has been repeatedly dated at 37,000 BP) can doubt that we are communicating with a mind similar to our own. We recognize and approve of the acute observation, vivid imagination and technical mastery. We think, this is quintessentially human. Despite the off chance that the painters just might have been neanderthals...  

These are big-game (megafauna) hunters, indeed, so good are they at the hunt that there is evidence that they exterminated all or much of the ice-age megafauna on all continents. Or perhaps they only drove the animals to the verge of extinction, after which the violent end of the glaciation did them in. At any rate, there was increasing need to become less dependent on hunting and more on gathering, and in some regions (e.g. the Levant) the harvesting of wild grains became of vital importance. Then, during the droughts of the sudden Younger Dryas cooling, the gatherers were no doubt more or less forced by circumstance to start cultivating and irrigating the grains they had become dependent on.  

A word on the Younger Dryas: Throughout the glaciation, the global climate had been punctuated by sudden spells of extreme cold. It turns out that these so-called Heinrich Events are caused by destabilization of the great Canadian (Laurentide) ice sheet, leading to very massive calving through the Davis Straits into the North Atlantic, which spreads cold world-wide. At the very end of the glaciation, something similar happens on an even grander scale. First there is a sudden extreme warming, destabilizing ice-sheets everywhere, then a sudden, equally extreme cooling, as vast masses of ice and ice water are released into the oceans, and then a repeated, equally abrupt warming, this time for good. The entire cycle took less than 3,000 years, but it forced the emergence of agriculture at an extremely early stage in the Middle East, and it may have played a hand in the megafauna extinctions that hit all continents at this time. (My conclusions here are debatable.)

Take a look at the Holocene interglacial again - the red field at the right end of the timeline. It has grown since the last timeline. We take note of how the Neolithic (agricultural stone age) is phased in, first in the Middle East, later throughout the rest of the world. Neolithic life is dependent on more or less fixed habitation in villages (later towns), and in the villages people live on top of each other and certain rules must therefore apply and certain authorities hold sway. Thus, the horizon of the peasant with his eyes fixed on the soil is reduced from that of his forebear, the far-ranging hunter.

Still further to the right on the timeline appear the first empires - the first real state societies, with cities, writing, money, slaves, wars, you name it. The little bubble at the end of timeline 12, is, as the timeline itself points out, what we refer to when we speak of "civilization".