This chronology of the Younger Dryas puts me in mind of the finds in southwest Egypt of Nabta Playa, a wet region (now dry sandy desert) about 9500 BCE. It was a well populated area and quite active in livestock, especially cattle.
I don't have access to my archives right now, but I remember that not only were large herds sequestered there, they were trading with other regions such as Asia Minor and Mesopotamia, far distances away.
Of course, being a pre-historic site, some of the chronology is in question as well assumed cultural civilization and commerce. Some support for the above narrative might be found in such contemporary sites as the monumental structure at Göbekli Tepe and nearby village architecture of Nevalı Çori, architecture revealing more settled habitation and a somewhat agrarian life style.
The ideas from my childhood years of an agrarian culture and urban civilization exploding mysteriously out of the sandy deserts of Egypt and Mesopotamia approximately 3500 BCE - with no precursor culture to nurture it, are facing more reasonable ideas with more contemporary discoveries filing in the blanks of late Neolithic cultures and life styles. Still a challenging area of study and exploration for aspiring scholars of the future (if we don't sink back into another post-Roman 'Dark Age' of ignorance and regression.)
The study's based on field data, and looks valid. That said, I do agree that the idea of a linear progression of development starting at a relatively recent time in perhaps a single place it outmoded. Settegast cited an uncalibrated RC date of 14K years BP for a specimen of multirow barley. It was dug up in the northern Levant if memory serves, so, ballpark of those prehistoric sites you mention. Corn domestication and cultivation goes back to at least 5000 BC in central Mexico. Agriculture probably came and went many times in many places.