This is true, but there were people living in Europe for thousands of years, into the Stone Age, and still nothing.
Wish people would grasp what I'm saying. I'm talking about Europe pre Christianity. Why so hard?
What books were pre Christian Europeans writing about their religions and philosophies?
OK. I get it. Yes, there were old cultures in Europe but no civilisation (other than Greece). Some possible reasons:
There’s a very strong tendency for pristine civilizations to form in river valleys surrounded by desert. This happened in Mesopotamia, Peru, Egypt, and along the Indus, and while the terrain around the Yellow River wasn’t quite desert, it was, I gather, rather dryer at the time (swampy southern Mexico, where the Olmec appeared, is an exception and we don’t really know why yet). The idea which has been advanced to explain this tendency is one of circumscribed and labor-intensive resources. The river valley has desirable productive land, so people want to live there and they may participate in things like irrigation canals which take a lot of effort to build, but the land is surrounded by vastly less desirably territory. People don’t want to move there if things go badly and are strongly motivated to stick with the infrastructure they’ve spent so much effort building. Population densities grow and people bump up against one another more and more often, and social conflicts proliferate. One way of dealing with that is by creating complex social structures to regulate those social conflicts, and pretty quickly you get kings, priests, palaces, temple complexes, and urban centers around them.
Europe, then, doesn’t have a lot of deserts. The conditions to be an early center of civilization doesn’t exist. It’s a well-watered territory for the most part, where you’re not limited to the immediate environs of a single major river for good farmland. It’s also worth noting that regions like Mesopotamia, Egypt, and so on had a bit of a head start. Agriculture started there earlier, so they had much longer to develop the social conditions leading to agriculture. In time, somebody somewhere in Europe might have created their own pristine civilization, but in the actual event, the practice arose in not just one but two adjacent regions and it spread into Europe before that could happen.
(Matt Riggsby, Quora)