I sometimes like to go down the rabbit hole of Atlantis and related conspiracies. I recall a time in my life those ideas seemed so laughable that they were completely pointless. I blame Joe Rogan and his podcasts with Graham Hancock for forcing me to consider ideas of ancient civilizations seriously. Not that I consider Graham Hancock's specific ideas to be serious. But it did force me to challenge my own preconceptions of what is possible.

I do recall, on hacker news I believe, an article posted based on a study by NASA scientists that tried to calculate the likelihood of finding evidence for civilizations 10 thousand years, 100 thousand years or older. What is shocking is how quickly any remnants of an advanced civilization could deteriorate. IIRC, the conclusion of the study was that the chance of us finding any evidence of civilizations that old were extremely small.

The idea that there was an ancient civilization over 10 thousand years ago is entirely plausible to me. Massive geological events (or even astrological ones like asteroid impacts) could have altered entire continents. Who knows what evidence is at the bottom of the Pacific ocean that we cannot access. Or what evidence has been forced under tectonic plates through subduction.

Of course, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and so far none of the presented evidence is extraordinary (IMO). But our fixed notion that civilization sprang up nearly fully formed 10 thousand years ago doesn't seem as clear to me as it once did.