The world's first cities are almost certainly under water

The oldest pottery in the world is Jōmon, from what is probably the Ainu people in Japan's northern most island.  This pottery dates to 14,000 B.C. or so - from the depths of the last Ice Age.

And so, if there was pottery - implying specialization of labor, there must have been largeish settlements.  So where are they?

The answer is probably under water.

Here's the world of the last Ice Age, around 20,000 years ago.  Dark are glaciers; green are areas fertile when it's wet; yellow are areas fertile all the time.  But dig this: so much water was locked up in glacial ice that sea levels were 200 feet lower than today.  The red on the map shows what was then dry land but what is today the deep.

And so when you consider just how many of the early settlements (that we know about) were at the mouths of rivers, the first Jōmon settlements are probably in the Sea Of Japan.

They may be at the bottom of the Persian Gulf - we just don't know because that was entirely dry land at the time.  If that's where people lived, then the artefacts will be on the sea bed.

It's said that the Scientific Method is not the replacing of a falsehood with a truth.  Rather, it's replacing a falsehood with a more subtle falsehood.  The pat answers of my youth - that civilization first got started at Jericho 10,000 years ago is almost subtly false.  As we peel back the onion of knowledge, we find that things are perennially astonishing.

Good.