Lost cities / archaeology / ancient history

It's so unlikely for wooden artifacts to be preserved from so long ago. I've long speculated that people must have lived in non-stone-built structures for far longer than the standard caricature of ancient people as cave-dwellers makes most modern commentators believe. It's just that wood and leather and other materials that people would have used rots away so quickly that if you're going with the available evidence, they're usually not easy or impossible to detect. Human culture and sophistication goes back far, far longer than is generally assumed.

What I always say when people basically doubt the humanity of 'Neanderthals'=ancient Europeans is that the familiar image of them was established in the 19th century for undoubtedly racist reasons. They were cultured, they had names, they spoke languages, and they were most definitely not a different species to 'modern humans'.

Precisely the same thing can be said about pre-Colombian inhabitants of the Americas. The majority likely lived in at least semi-permanent settlements, they had sophisticated trade networks, they organised into confederations, they had some form of education. They very obviously knew how to clothe themselves beyond untreated fur loinclothes, but they’re still imagined as half naked most of the time (of course, there were varying levels of development across the continent).

But that doesn’t fit the narrative of illuminated white Europeans bringing civilisation to savages, which is prevalent even today. Ironically, committing genocide is far more savage than living in wooden longhouses.