The megaliths of Bolivia and structures all over the world which man could not replicate prove this. It would seem that the more we turn our back on the natural world and our history, the more we hold ourselves back from break throughs in many areas.
Who says we can't replicate them? It's just not economical to do so and really serves no purpose. The world has generally moved past projects with superstitious/dubious meaning attached to them and does an actual cost/benefit on most large scale endeavors. Except for some developing countries with growing economies who have something to prove.
You are correct we probably can today. The biggest prehistoric megalith blocks are somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,500 tons, perfectly milled. The modern record for the largest structure lifted by crane is 20,000 tons. So we have an order of magnitude capability on be ancients.
However what is certainly true is that there was a long period in between where we couldn’t. From at least 1000 BC to sometime in the 1900s AD it would’ve been physically impossible to recreate Baalbek. Yet somehow thousands of years before that ancient people did it.
My pet theory is they used compound reed boats, canals, and locks to do it. But in the end we don’t know.
What’s clear is there were people more similar to us than we are to the Elizabethans in terms of technological capability, and they were totally wiped out. No stories, other than myths, no pottery, no metals, nothing left of them except the most durable giant stone remnants.
In other words: the up and to the right trajectory of history is wrong. There are bigger cycles in civilization than all of history combined can illuminate.
I think we will find proof if we start digging into the flood deltas and the near shore oceans depths. The floods at the beginning and end of the younger dryas washed over most, if not all of the earths land mass, in a catastrophic way. Then the sea rises, burying the washed out remains of civilization under a few hundred feet of saltwater. If were going to find anything, I think it will be there. That's my hypothesis anyway.
