This is a hard subject to discuss because there’s a ton of fud and unintellectual nonsense (e.g. people who want hyperborea or Atlantis to have been real industrial civilizations.)

There probably wasn’t some industrial level civilization as we know it. But there’s 200,000 years of human history and the there was another ~20ky period like ours 120,000 years ago in between ice ages. Humans migrated across the old world at this time and they likely had societies we’ll never know about.

I try to envision ways they could have achieved cool tech but primitive. So maybe there was no industrial civilization but maybe some mystic religious society devised some way to do computation (if we really wanted to we can build do computation with water and irrigation) and learned a ton about the universe.

My hot take is we do man a disservice by saying civilization began with writing. There were certainly societies that learned lots of truths about the universe and passed them on via memes and superstitions.