Ian Morris argues in Why the West Rules that people all over the world had the tendency to develop agriculture and the like, and started to do so with the start of the present interglacial period, but that people in the Middle East succeeded first simply because there were more plant and animal species there that could be usefully domesticated. According to him, people elsewhere would have done the same thing in the long run, perhaps in another one or two thousand years, but in many places this was prevented by the societies meeting before this had a chance to happen. I found his account pretty plausible.