Of course, humans did not go from being unable to care for each other to forming cities overnight. Agriculture and even some amount of trading was happening far

Of course, humans did not go from being unable to care for each other to forming cities overnight. Agriculture and even some amount of trading was happening far before people started wrangling cities within the same control structures. The moment in history when human settlements got large enough to encompass multiple locations and require coordination is a useful concept, and as far as I can tell, modern historians consider that to be around 4000 BC. That's not to say nothing interesting happened before, or no one was building things or whatever. It just wasn't happening at a scale that required things like a bureaucracy or writing to coordinate things across multiple places.