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It seems to me that this verse indicates by use of the word "perhaps" that the possibility is open that individual gentiles on any continent had the capacity to have done this "seeking...reaching out....finding...."

I think you are "reaching" if you go so far as to say that this verse indicates all individuals everywhere had the abililty to attain a knowledge of God sufficient for salvation by any stretch. They were not "seeking" God in the sense of desiring to know Him, only in the quest for knowledge and knowing OF Him. It's what comes of such knowledge that is important.

Gill:

That they should seek the Lord…
Or "God", as the Alexandrian copy and others, and the Vulgate Latin, Syriac, and Ethiopic versions read; their Creator, and kind Benefactor, and who has appointed their time of life, and their habitations for them; and this should engage them to seek to know him, who has done all this for them, and to fear and serve him, and to glorify his name:
if haply they might feel after him, and find him;
which shows, that though it is possible for men, by a contemplation of the perfections of God, visible in the works of creation and providence, so to find God, as to know that there is one, and that there is but one God, who has made all things; and so as to be convinced of the vanity and falsehood of all other gods, and to see the folly, wickedness, and weakness of idolatrous worship; yet, at the same time, it very strongly intimates, how dim and obscure the light of nature is; since those, who have nothing else to direct them, are like persons in the dark, who "feel" and grope about after God, whom they cannot see; and after all their search and groping, there is only an "haply", a peradventure, a may be, that they find him:
though he be not far from everyone of us;
not only by his omnipresence, and immensity, whereby he is everywhere; but by his power in supporting all in their being; and by his goodness in continually communicating the blessings of providence to them.

Even those, who by their own intellectual and philosophical observation come to the place of notitia and even assensus, will stop short of fiducia and fail to fully attain to a true saving faith in Christ apart from the regenerative work of the Holy Spirit.