I think you need evidence of a system of government, agriculture, culture, laws to dispense justice predictably and a writing system to track and record aspects of the above. Hence we can have Egyptian, Indus, etc., but not prehistoric civilizations. The human organizations just didn’t have enough progress to be considered civilized. Thats not to say they were not advanced vis a vis their other contemporaries but rather didn’t meet certain milestones that mark a civilization.
A distinctly Western European perspective.<p>I would rate Narwala Gabarnmang as one of the earliest sites of civilization, personally.
Most early civilizations arose in the East (today’s India, Egypt, China, etc., not Europe but that’s the normal take on what constitutes civilization) else we verge on saying any human organization is civilization (which I would disagree with).
Doesn't civilization just literally mean a system of living together in a city? There doesn't need to be any written record of how they did it does there, just evidence that they did?