Ok, lot's of specific claims that might be fun to bet bogged down in, but I want to stick to my larger point, which it seems I'm not expressing clearly.
Whatever the exact mechanics and proximate causes of the transition to agriculture (and by agriculture I mean pastoralism too, any mode of living when you take charge and actively develop your source of calories, instead of just hoping they will be somewhere out there) as it happened in the upper Paleolithic, it doesn't explain my actual question - why it happened at that time, and that time only. When, as we know now, even if it was a cope the first few generations, it soon turned out to be a massive advantage and agricultural societies completely obliterated hunter-gatherer ones in a very short time (on the time scale I'm talking about)
Maybe it wasn't such an immediate upgrade and it was more a necessity/cope. Maybe it was ennui. It's sill weird that whatever set of conditions it was, it wasn't really that rare because it happened on at least 5, maybe even 10 or more different occassions in different places. The Papuans
did eventually domesticate, on their own initiative, a couple plants and animal species. It didn't snowball as much as it did elsewhere, but it also never went away. So, the circumstances were not that rare, it didn't happen just once, so you could argue that "oh gee it was such an unlikely and unpredictable event, truly as close as you can get to a miracle without going supernatural". Yet, all those instances happened in a very short time interval (short relative to the total span of the species). I expect there would be local overpopulations all time time during those 300k years that would force them to experiment with agriculture (again including pastoralism).
That's what I meant with tool-making too. It is such a massive advantage, that I find it shocking that the sum of life on Earth generated this mutation/innovation only once* over the billions years of life on Earth.
I don't have an agenda here, I'm not trying to suggest it was exactly as <my religion>has been saying all along. Or that it was the Annunaki or black obelisks or whatever
Although....I'm also not saying it wasn't it