Agriculture was a prerequisite for civilization, agreed. But some in this thread seem to assume that agriculture was an obvious choice to be made by our species, if only we had the wit way back when. The problem is that the untold progress made possible by agriculture was not evident to the first farmers, quite the contrary. Skeletal remains of the very first farming populations in the Fertile Crescent show that people were shorter in stature, had new kinds of nutritional deficiencies, worse teeth etc., than their direct hunter-gatherer ancestors.
Why did societies in the Fertile Crescent turn into agriculture, then? Back in the 1960’s it was first hypothesized that environmental change, which made hunting worse locally, was the impetus for early agriculture. Göbekli Tepe, a recent, unique site mentioned by Shagnasty hint that people in the area were engaging in mass activities that supported the switch to foodstuffs that could support crowds, stirring the chicken-and-egg-dilemma juicily. Certainly, the Fertile Crescent had the best possible native flora and fauna to work with.
At the same time as the first farmers in the Middle East based their living on wheat and goat, and rice and maize cultivation was possibly just beginning in China and Central America, Eurasian hunter-gatherer societies spread north to colonize the lands that had emerged from beneath the continental ice. Subsisting on game animals such as moose, deer, beaver and waterfowl was more than a passable option, as evidenced by early Holocene burial grounds in Northern Russia: the dead are near as tall as modern people, with appreciably stronger bones (and once muscles) and better teeth than we have. The material culture of these populations is every bit as advanced as at the earliest farming dwelling sites – the main difference at that point was that agricultural centers supported a much higher population density, although semi- or even fully sedentary, hierarchical societies did rise in Stone Age Northern Europe, all on hunting and gathering.
Cereal crops and domestic animals were staples in the Fertile Crescent by 11 000 BP, yet the first agricultural societies in Central Europe emerged not until a full 5 000 years later. In Northern Europe, it’s archaeologically evident that local hunter-gatherer societies, who were certainly in contact with early farmers, did not make the switch until much later, accompanied by a deteriorating environment after the mid-Holocene climatic optimum, just some 3 - 5 000 years ago. People apparently chose not to farm, until hunting and gathering didn’t work as well as it used to be.
Recent genetic and isotope studies have confirmed that in many places in prehistoric Europe the hunter-gatherers never turned into agriculturalists via cultural diffusion, as was widely hypothesized in post-WW II archaeology, but were effectively displaced by invading agricultural peoples, just as happened time and again in the historical period - only the first time around it was due to sheer asymmetry in numbers and disease, not because of any technological superiority. The same scenario likely played out on every continent where indigenous agriculture was developed prehistorically.
It is obvious to us how agriculture changed the world, but it took a whole lot of farming under rare, optimal conditions to get much anywhere, culturally. Attempts at domestication may have occurred untold times before it stuck the few times it did.
I don’t think there is any evidence that the inhabitants were doing agriculture, IIRC we are talking about a few stone hearths, some animal bones and some evidence of perhaps some permanent or semi-permanent wooden structures (huts and the like). There is equal evidence from the Clovis culture that obviously crossed to the Americas over the Bering straight land bridge during the same time period, and plenty of equal evidence other parts of the world of similar technological capabilities at the same or even earlier times.