askchapo

Nah, we'd know. Like there's some possibility people were doing, idk, ironmongery 100kya+ ago, but metallurgy leaves very obvious contimates in the soil, glass and ceramics never decay. Any refined aluminum would be a dead giveaway. Like it's possible people independently discovered mettalurgy or pottery or something a few times and we just haven't found the sites yet, but large scale industry makes a mess.

There isn't any evidence for it, anywhere. The closest real thing would be that the bow and arrow was independently incented a number of times in different places.

That had been true for most of our cultural memory though. It wasn't till the mid 1900 our engineering was as good as the Roman's. So in living memory there were people who had the experience of living in a world that wasn't as cool as existed in antiquity.

Now, that does forget that most people in roman times weren't having a good time. Just that their good times were better than ours for most history.