Indian archaeologists don’t all insist that, just the viciously nationalistic ones do. They also ridiculously claim that there was never an Aryan migration into India, even though the vintage literature says so, and records things that have been documented only in ancient sites in Central Asia. The same jokers have never shown even one site that exceeds 5K or 6K, other than run of the mill Neolithic sites, and even the earliest cities are mostly nameless, having not survived either in local tradition (because the population isn’t descended from the earlier occupants) or in the ancient literature.
There are small pyramid sites in Greece that are of early classical times, but some nutjobs insist on the entirely baseless claim that they are 20,000 years old.
For most of the past two million years, the continental shelf has been exposed during glaciation, while the interiors have been covered with ice. Hence, much if not most of what our ancestors did and where they lived is covered by water now.
This topic has generated the level of discussion I’d hoped it would; clearly the wheel is so obvious that it was independently invented a number of times, and used where needed and when appropriate. And sometimes lost or discarded, or declining into trivial uses.
When the French came to build a fort in northern New York in 1700`s they asked their Abenaki and Iroquois allies where a good source of hard stone was so they could quarry it out for building the stone fort.
The Indians said, ``Follow us. They showed the French engineers 2 different sites only 1/4 of a mile apart that had been blasted out with hundreds of stone blocks some 6 long and wide and one was piled up like a small mountain of huge toy blocks.
The British showed this huge `pile of stones` on a 1758-9 map.
I saw one of the `stone mountains` and clambered all over it when I was a kid in 1940` s and the huge stone blocks were still there but they were removed to build dams etc in the 1960`s. The other one`s blocks evidently were removed to build the fort.
In California from Orinda to San Jose along the eastern shoreline hills of San Francisco Bay, a long stone wall that stands 12 feet tall is buried in the ground along the tops of the Oakland and Hayward hills along Barn Rock Road and other parts. Only the tops of the stones are visible.
A nun did a study of these features and it was published in the Oakland Tribune in the 1980`s with pictures>
The Ohlone Indians there say that this ``wall` was there when their ancestors came thousands of years ago. I saw the humongous blocks of stone on Barn Rock Road on the curve in the 1980`s-90`s dug up by the developers for housing projects in the hills. Many were used in the barns and houses there for foundations years ago before the developers got there. Figure that one out.