Drake

The wheel was only invented in about two places - the Fertile Crescent (present day Middle East) and China. It may not even have been invented in China and instead transmitted there by people in the Fertile Crescent the way it was transmitted to Europe through conquest.

Western civilization (not to be confused with Western cultures) was the first to recognize and promote universal principles like human rights, freedom, equality, reason, and logic and is IMO superior to other civilizations, technologically and socially. Before Western civilization, other civilizations across the world in every continent (eg. Aztec in S. America, Minoan in Europe, Egypt in Africa, Shang Dynasty in China etc), were technologically and socially advanced at different times and in different ways, but none recognized all the principles above.

Thanks to philosophers like Socrates and arguably religions like Christianity, those bedrock principles of Western civilization spread (imperfectly, mind you) across Europe and from there to other continents. Nobody could have foreseen or predicted any of this. Yet we're all the beneficiaries of it and should be grateful.

But it's a bit of a stretch to compare some small isolated tribes and to speculate about how two entire continents would have developed. Who knows, the Mayan and Aztec cultures might have spread and killed off these small tribes or assimilated them. Those civilizations had more than spears and huts. They may not be sending rockets into space (history, culture, and religion influence our motivations to explore and the raw materials around us influence it as well) but they may not be living in huts either.