Not to interrupt but can we approach this from a different angle?
you guys get so carried away talking about rocks and tools and shit. We talk about rocks because on a long enough time line carefully stacked piles of rocks are about the only thing that survives through the ages to leave evidence that a society existed which created it. Time and the environment pretty much erodes away everything else, and hell given a long enough timeline even rocks wear away. (Look at the Sphinx and the erosion it experienced)
We like to think that, if our modern society were to collapse to some catastrophic event we'd leave behind more evidence than just carefully stacked rocks but the reality is nah, not really. a few thousand years and there would be virtually no evidence that we existed beyond some carefully stacked rocks. Virtually everything recording our existence is digital now, on computer chips which last less than 1 decade. Even our books only last a few hundred years. without human beings to maintain it, rust and time will claim the steel, the skyscrapers, the concrete buildings, everything. In a few thousand years the only evidence we existed would be the nuclear waste which we fucking buried to prevent future intelligent beings from accidently killing themselves by being exposed to it.
So the one thing we know for sure is that we really don't know that much. The timeline for when civilization began continues to get pushed back the more we dig up and discover, currently its what 12k years with Gobekli Tepe and similar sites? And the archaeological timeline for anatomically modern man keeps getting pushed back as well, it was 200k years but recent discoveries puts it at closer to 300k, and maybe even 400k years?
This belief that we were cavemen hunter/gatherers for 300k+ years then suddenly 12k years ago we just one day started building massive temples and learned agriculture is pretty fucking ridiculous, which is what spawns all these alternative theories. Religious or otherwise it doesn't matter, even biblical creationists who support a 6k year old earth aren't any less wrong that currently accepted archaeological theory. They are both wildly wrong.
So forget about rocks. fuck em. Let's talk about Nylon.
When I was a kid going through school I remember learning about the craziest shit, bacteria which had developed the proteins/amino acids/whatever to digest Nylon. Nylon had been invented and commercially sold back in 1940, and these bacteria had been discovered by 1985. Keep in mind I was a kid in the 90s and "popular science" typically lags behind about a decade after scientific breakthroughs like that occur, so talking early to mid 90s news of this bacteria was making the rounds. It was amazing that it took bacteria only 40 years to evolve the ability to eat this new man-made material, this radically changed the thinking on how much time evolution required before major mutations could happen, completely changed timelines, went a long way towards explaining some questionable timelines like the pre-Cambrian explosion, etc. I remember specifically there being a lot of push back about evolution being taught in schools (grew up in the south) and about how this recent discovery was absolute proof of evolution, etc etc.
Fast forward to a few years ago. Well, remember popular science is typically 10 years behind the curve so I just learned about it a few years ago but it happened back in 2007. Turns out, as our understanding of DNA improved and we started mapping out genomes and such, we fully mapped the genome of these Nylon eating bacteria and made a startling discovery. Turns out the genetic code and proteins required to digest Nylon already existed in those bacteria, in fact nearly all bacteria share a similar DNA sequence that, with minor modification/simple mutation would allow them to digest Nylon.
Turns out, bacteria has seen Nylon before. At some point along the eons of genetic memory bacteria has been exposed to nylon long ago, evolved the ability to digest it, and then over time "lost" that ability due to no longer requiring it/being exposed to the material. This is why it took bacteria only 40 years to regain the ability.
Remember Nylon is not naturally occurring, it is 100% man-made. At some point in the 300k+ year history of anatomically modern man a civilization arose that invented Nylon. they are lost to history. civilizations have risen and been wiped out, probably happened 10-20 times due to all sorts of cataclysmic events throughout history. All the rocks and carvings are just evidence of the latest lost civilization from only 12k years ago. There were many more before it. Even rocks erode. 300k+ years of Einstein's and Shakespeare's and Plato's and Newton's. They invented Nylon, and the proof of it is embedded in the Genetic code of the bacteria that eats it. We did not spend 288k years as ooga booga hunter/gatherers before figuring out how to plant crops. We rediscovered it over and over again or it was passed down to us by survivors of the previous civilization that had that knowledge.
If we all get wiped out in WW3 and beyond a few stragglers the only people who survive are the uncontacted tribes throughout the amazon, africa, sentinel island, etc what will their oral tradition and myths about us say? After a few thousand years of that oral history, when society starts over again, how will they describe the mushroom clouds of nuclear war that wiped out us, the before people? Will they describe us as Gods the way the bible and other religious texts describe our predecessors?
