The official history says humans started diverging from advanced monkeys only 12k years ago. The unofficial history describes a few impressive and socially advanced civilizations before that "flood" event, but all of them valued knowledge only so long as it helped with day to day tasks. So they've built some interesting structures, but weren't technologically advanced by our standards. Our generation, that started 12k years ago, is the first that values knowledge for the sake of knowledge, so we we have things like theoretical math.