It depends on how you define civilization. The Aboriginal Australian civilization predates the early Mesopotamian civilization that I learned about in school, but that civilization was only seen as the first because of eurocentric ideas of what a civilization looks like. In Australia they were hunter-gatherers, but also practiced advanced agriculture that Europeans didn’t even recognize as agriculture when they got there. The comment I made about the earliest civilization being in Africa was based on a list I saw that considered the San people of Africa the first civilization. But they didn’t really justify it either.