The Myth of Civilisation as a a single narrative with rises and falls

This keeps coming up in speculative fiction and it bugs me. I'm not a historian, and I know it's wrong (and the more history I learn, the more obviously wrong it becomes). If there's some actual historian debunking this narrative somewhere I can link to I would be very grateful!

EDIT: So apparently this was named and described in 1931: Whig history. And yet people still use it! (Well, that isn't exactly what I'm talking about. But it's certainly close)
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