First things first. The idea of "civilization" itself is something increasingly controversial among academics. While I think what it denotes has value (i.e. social stratification, state-level society, intensified agriculture, invention of a writing system), if better serviced by a different name, others would argue the entire concept is fundamentally flawed & ethnocentric.

When sites like Wikipedia or grade school textbooks talk about "cradles of civilization," what they really mean is "independent discovery of agriculture." Mesopotamia, the Indus River Valley, the Yellow River Valley, the Nile, Mesoamerica, & now the Andes are all believed to have independently invented various forms of intensive agriculture - leading to what VG Childe described as the "urban revolution" or "urban civilization.' Think increased population density, greater class-stratification, large-scale public works, invention of writing, representational art, systemic inquires into science/engineering, the necessity of long-distance trade, labour specification, & new political organization (i.e. the early state).

Everywhere else, besides these six or seven locales, either did not adopt the agricultural state or most likely took its aspects form those original loci of creation. For example, the Greek alphabet (on which ours is still based) came from modifying Mesopotamian scripts derived from cuniform [See commenter below]. Just to give you an idea of the time-depth we're talking about here - agriculture in Mesopotamia emerged around 10kya, "civilization" (i.e. the agricultural state) arose in the region sometime around 6 or 7kya, while the earliest peoples we might reasonably call "Greeks" (i.e. the Myceneans of the Illiad) are documented at some point around 4kya. The "Classical Greece" of Athens, Sparta, all those big names & events we know today? A relatively paltry 2.5kya. From bronze working to concepts of the redistributive state to agriculture (the idea & the grain) itself, these ideas appear to have spread from the Near East through Crete then up into Hellas. This transmission is the basis of what we call "world systems theory;" basically holding that as "core" states need to expand & exploit their hinterlands, "semi-peripheries" develop which fuse indigenous & state knowledge to propel their own dynamism once the "core" states enter retractive periods.

Now, we need to be very cautious here b/c this should not be taken to reify the "ex orientis lux" mythos of early archaeology. All knowledge did not flow from the "enlightened" east into the "barbaric" Europe & birth "civilization" - for example, many of the megalithic structures in Europe predate those of Anatolia or the Near East. Rather, we should recognize the agency of indigenous peoples (i.e. these proto-Europeans) in adapting foreign technologies & materialities to their own ends. In modern history, we might think of how the Amerindians of the Plains took to the horse or the spread of tobacco in W. Africa.

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Why we think of "civilization" as we do:

• Childe, V. Gordon

(1950) "The Urban Revolution" in The Town Planning Review 21(1): 3-17.

Why should we want to change those assumptions:

• Smith, Michael E.(2009) "V. Gordon Childe and the Urban Revolution: A Historical Perspective on a Revolution in Urban Studies" The Town Planning Review 80(1): 3-29.
• Diamond, Jared(1987) "The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race" in Discover Magazine: 64-66. ^(Yes, it's short & for a general audience...but it's also one of the best for getting students to reconsider fundamental biases they hold by virtue of 10k year of indoctrination.)

World Systems:

• Hall, Thomas D., P. Nick Kardulias, & Christopher Chase-Dunn
  (2011) "World-Systems Analysis and Archaeology: Continuing the Dialogue" in Journal of Archaeological Research 19(3): 233-279.

Dating megaliths:

• Paulsson, B. Schulz(2019) "Radiocarbon dates and Bayesian modeling support maritime diffusion model for megaliths in Europe" in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 116(9): 3460-3465.

Big books of early agriculture:

• Ford, Richard I. (editor)(1985) Prehistoric Food Production in North America. University of Michigan Press, University of Michigan Museum of Anthropological Archaeology.
• Scott, James C.(2017) Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States. Yale University Press.

Andes are...unique compared to the other riverine regions:

• Heggarty, Paul & David Beresford‐Jones(2010) "Agriculture and Language Dispersals: Limitations, Refinements, and an Andean Exception?" Current Anthropology 51(2): 163-191.