Returning to the question of the first paved road 'anywhere', I believe Detroit's claim is that it had the first poured concrete road in the US, which was laid in 1907. In world terms and taking paving as any hard surface, unqualified by type, Detroit is not in the running (neither, incidentally, is the great road-builder, Macadam). The Romans were building stone-surfaced roads more than 2000 years ago. The Appian Way was laid across marshland and you can still walk on large and impressive areas of its surviving surface. And the Romans were certainly not the first.