Early civilisations, including Ethiopia, have been found in sub-Saharan Africa but dating back to early Christian times. I suspect little money and effort has been expended to find more within homo sapiens original home, certainly compared to the money spent on the search for ancient human fossils.
Simple assumptions, prejudice or the need to redefine civilisation? While the previous term is employed for settlements or cities, these are further defined as ones of stone or brick. Usually, they exhibited the same structural or design qualities with large central buildings and defined areas of settlement based on class.
In Central Asia at the time of the early great Sumerian cities like Uruk, a huge Kurgan complex of tents existed. Archaeologists and historians do not of course refer to it as a civilisation, at least in the same way they reference Sumeria.
If some attempt is made, will we find huge settlements of mud huts covering wide areas throughout the region? Will we also discover writing?
It is kind of ironic that we may never know of the most advanced civilizations in the past, because their members were accomplishing trade, art, and agriculture instead of being enslaved to pile rocks and dirt into massive monuments to their rulers. Recent advances in genomics indicate the ancients were far, far mobile on a global scale than the conventional narrative. Probably what we get to see are the remains of civilizations that drove themselves to ecological collapse, so rapidly the remnant population wasn't enough to re-use the materials.
That greater movement occurred is probably the case. The Sumerians (early Uruk), expanding their mercantile territory certainly got into Anatolia and Egypt.
Of course, civilisation was not only made of stone.
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