> If these societies were that advanced, would they not have figured out a fraction of the things that we have in modern times?
The interesting question from Graham Hancock’s books is along the lines of: “If these societies were that advanced, how would we know?”
Until Gobekli Tepi was discovered, there was no evidence that humans did anything other than bang rocks together till the end of the last ice age.
We can not use radio carbon dating on inorganic material. We can’t look at a stone monument and determine it’s age purely by looking at the stones. For big monuments, the best we do is “the oldest thing we found here that shouldn’t be here unless someone put it here is xxxx years old. Therefore this is at least xxxx years old”
Graham Hancock and others pointed out that several monuments were aligned astronomically if you assume they were built at the end of the ice age. We didn’t believe anyone could have built the monuments that early because we hadn’t discovered Gobekli Tepi yet.
Basically the current problem isn’t absence of evidence that people were advanced back in the ice age. The problem is determining what is evidence and what is coincidence - and a lot of things that should have been evidence were brushed aside as coincidence because that determination was done pre gobekli tepi.