I would rather instead of hearing "that is the way it was/is". I would like people to actual read about cultures in 4000 BC. Starting in 4000 BC would not mean Europe was not nonexistent. Instead of saying who is important I thought this game was to play an alternate history that you shape. It tries to give that appearance, but it is for people who do not care about how cultures change. Instead it focuses on nationalism of the present day and tries to apply the concept to the past. I would want to focus on technology not time making civilizations. Each with different tech trees per region of globe till merging together in the end.
Here is an example of what I would think make a interesting game.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurgan_hypothesis
I would like to play a civilization before the Indo-Europeans poured into Europe. There were many groups gone after this. The Basque is an example of a preIndo-European group(Meaning a linguistic isolate but of course had influence from other cultures). Now many groups did not have permanent cities. I would not mind have everyone starting trying to even get to technology to be able to form a permanent city.
Anyway my idea "Rise of the Homos" (I know a stupid name but meant to be catchy) is trying to redo where Civ lacks in the beginning. I would like to redo the tech tree where certain groups have different techs, and these techs open up possible new civs that you can change to per era.
Anyway there are tons of groups of people at one point or another that have surged in advancement in comparison to other groups around them. I would find it fun to play for example in the Incas rise to power. The tech tree I thought was meant to represent where these groups are at. For example I would consider peoples in the Americas as in Stone Age transiting to the Copper Age when the Europeans appeared.
So basically alternate history meaning I could play someone unimportant in real modern era of history and pretend they never disappeared. But that does not mean they would be the same group for 6000 years. The Incas for example I could see having various possible civs forming after going into a Iron Age without European influence.
Did Europe have that much influence on the world? Is really a dumb question. Did Mesoamerica have that much influence on the world? Dumb as well but I bet you are eating Chocolate, Corn, and etc that originated there. Now I want to drink some of an Ethiopian plant called coffee(Brought to Europe by Arabs and probably tiggering Europeans of the time to think again making an enlightment). There are too many things anyway that other groups outside of Europe continent(Which I really think should be considered a subcontinent of Eurasia) that influenced aka "Europeans".
You don't know what would happen if Distillation or Algebra was not created in Arab Caliphate and learned in Europe would be the outcome. Or who knows if China had not improved the paper the making process, gunpowder, compass. Modern Western culture is based on getting ideas from the other groups. So anyway I wish it would reflect it better. None of the ideas are displayed correctly in the time of stages it took in the tech tree.