This reminds me of one curious legend / hypothesis about the last days of Atlantis that I read in some book. The story was basically that during the Atlantis era, the "world config" was tuned slightly differently and that allowed what we'd call magic: curious long distance effects that could be caused without the modern tech. For some time it went well, but then it started sliding to the dark side: bad and evil people, that could use anything to gain power, kept winning over the good people who were restricted by "moral" and things like that. By about 10,000 B.C. the power of evil people became indisputable: they could see nearly everything and could instantly squash any opposition by means of notoriously powerful black magic. There were a couple unsuccessful attempts to bring power back to good people, but it never worked for long time: evil people kept taking it back quickly and efficiently. I think, the Lord of The Rings book took the idea from that story. The situation looked completely hopeless and there was no point to continue running this show, so shortly before 10,000 B.C. the entire civilization was "hard reset" and the "world config" was tweaked to prevent any long distance effects. Since then people are following the technology track. As we see, it's taken only 12,000 years to replicate the very same system without any magic: powerful long distance weapons and amazing surveillance technology that would impress even the Sauron form the movie. We are only missing that Sauron who would consolidate all the power.