Paths to Civilization

I was reading an article in the latest National Geographic called: "The Birth of Religion:The World's First Temple" and since one of my majors in college was cultural Anthropology I was interested in their chart of "Paths to Civilization" . According to the graph on page 41 there are two basic but slightly different paths to civilization. It appears that once hunter gatherers evolved into growing food as farmers, they stopped traveling around so much with their herds of goats and sheep and they kept their sheep and goats and started farming and living in one place rather than being so nomadic as hunter gatherers have to be to survive and to get enough food to keep going. But to farm alongside growing numbers of neighbor farmers, people had to share some ideas and beliefs so they wouldn't kill each other so much. So, organized religions slowly formed so people (at least publicly) appeared to share more beliefs and this caused neighbors to have less reason to kill each other generally speaking. So, in one diagram farming led to religion and in the other path religion lead to farming. I think it much more likely that farming led to religion than the other way around if you think about it. However, it is also possible that someone thought God or (Gods) wanted them to stay in a certain place or farm and then it could be said that Religion or Religious Experience led to Farming. So, then in a sense I can see that with so many people going in this direction around the same time in the Fertile Crescent, this gave rise to both farming and religion. With the last blast of the Ice Age around 9600 BC in the Fertile Crescent of Turkey all the way over to Iran both farming and more organized religions began around this time there.

However, my thought is that if there have been regular ice ages here on Earth, how would we know if there were civilizations before any ice age? The ice coming and going likely would just grind up into dust all evidence of previous civilizations. This is my thought about civilizations before major ice ages. So then, I believe it is possible that there have been possibly 100s of different types of human civilizations and possibly every big ice age kills off civilizations here on earth and throws humans back into the stone age. Both logically and as an intuitive this is my experience. So therefore it is possible that we have achieved this present level of technology here on earth many times before as humans.