Writing is about 10 Ky old, but clearly organized groups with language, rituals, manufacturing, structures etc long predate that in the fossil record.

Ok language of course technically doesn’t predate writing in the fossil record itself but writing, arithmetic, etc in many languages means that predated writing. Plato reported that Socrates opposed writing. Etc.

I'm still not clear on how you're defining civilization. The typical definition includes large population centers with some central authority, along with trade routes and divided labor. Roughly 3000-4000 BC IIRC.

Writing isn't even as old as civilization by this definition. I'm curious where you're getting this huge 10,000 years ago number from. Maybe you're just rounding up and I'm being a pedant, but I don't think there's much that would be considered civilization many thousands of years prior to Sumer.

That's quite a Spenglarian definition of "civilization". Compare that to, say, Margaret Meade who gave an example of civilization being demonstrated by someone surviving for years post a traumatic injury (broken leg), which required specific non-animal level of cooperation and support of someone who couldn't hunt or gather.

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.