Europe's now-drowned 'lost world' and the 25m-high tsunami that finished it off

> We can only go by what we know and what we have evidence for

There is nuance here, in the degree to which uncertainty due to lack of evidence is surfaced in scientific communications for the public.

Take for instance, the behavior of dogs. Science cannot [yet] objectively answer the question of how much the subjective qualia of a dog is comparable to the qualia of humans. What then can we say about whether dogs feel 'love'? Some might say that science has not yet answered this question; that is fine.

But others get overeager and assert that because science hasn't demonstrated that dogs feel love, the scientific position is to assume all apparent demonstrations of love from dogs are little more than elaborate food seeking behavior. This goes too far, it assumes a lack of evidence is evidence to the contrary, implicitly treating science as complete until proven otherwise. I think this overzealous sort of 'scientific' thinking reflects a dogmatic attitude which is actually antithetical to the real scientific method.

A simpler alternative assumption could be this:

1. sophistication is driven by specialization

2. the ability to specialize is driven by access to surplus energy

3. before the advent of agriculture bands of humans simply did not have the excess calories available to them to support a priesthood and philosophers and bureaucrats, etc.

> Even our metal based structures would not withstand it very well over a few thousand years.

Well, not steel framed buildings or anything like that. But our modern civilization has certainly done things that I think stand a good chance of lasting hundreds of millions of years. Take for instance glass bottles. Those tossed into the ocean won't last more than a few decades before they're eroded to nothing (see: sea glass), but we've created so many glass bottles and distributed them so far and wide, it is virtually certain that many of them will survive in the soil for a very very long time. There is no doubt that glass can last for millions of years under the right conditions; there is a lot of volcanic glass around that attests to this. There are so many glass bottles in landfills or littered around the world, at least some of them are certain to be in geologically stable conditions.

Then there are things like mountaintop removal mining. Maybe normal quarries get filled in and hidden over time, but there's no hiding the top of a mountain being sliced right off.

I warmly recommend to anyone interested in this line of thought James Scott's "Against the grain" for oldest evidence of the first agrarian states in the middle east.

"Against the grain" points out that it's not obvious as number of people increases everyone wants to live in cities ruled over and taxed by someone else.

"I think it’s pretty clear that sophisticated societies existed long before recorded history."

If you mean beyond 12k years or so I would not say it's "pretty clear". I would go as far and say it's psychologically and biologically feasible, but we have no evidence to back this up.

What archaeological evidence does prove, is that arrival of anything resembling civilization was a shambolic affair lasting thousands of years, composed of waxing and waning city-sized polities that could at maximum control only few tens of square kilometers of area.

What we do have are sites like Göbekli Tepe at max 12 000 years ago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe

The arrival of agricultural plants is around the same time during Neolithic Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neolithic_Revolution

I think you would need to expand on the meaning of "sophisticated". I don't want to presume your intent with the use of this word.

But, a hunter gatherer society looks quite a lot different from an agricultural society.

Of course the people living in a hunter gatherer society could very well be artistically and philosophically very developed. But the likelihood of an "Atlantean supercivilization" would be very small.

I think both options are pretty cool. As a species we have a history of 200 000 years. Either our past is riddled with complex emergent societies that have been ground to dust, forgotten, only for the cycle to start again a new over and over again over thousands of years. And only on our current cycle we've managed to start to reach the full potential of our species.

Or, there have not been "civilizational cycles" which would make our anthropocene epoch with it's industrialization and science something even more mind blowingly astonishing.

Both options are humbling.

I think most people are just repeating what they learned as children and haven't given it much more thought. So the answer is usually some combination of religious influences, when you were schooled, and what textbook your teacher was using.

In 2008, this is what a certain group in Hollywood thought 10,000 B.C. was like... anachronisms and all.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10,000_BC_(film)