I lost this post a few paragraphs in, posting anyway:

There is only so much that can be gleaned from found evidence. The customs and assumptions of our time also affect the way we reconstruct these stories and civilizations.

In many cases, the archaeological evidence is never even recovered: our entire civilization lives above those that came before us. Sometimes, even outright fabrication is allowed for decades[1][2] in the guise of "advancement of Science™".

In my opinion, musing about "different populations" on the basis of subtle positioning of things is an exercise in futility. Even with genetic evidence, there is very little that can be said about the relationship between those peoples and the things found -- maybe those were relics carried by outsiders, or remorse by genociders (a population does not just "vanish") or really anything else.

Even when closely examining large structures like the Great Pyramid, there's evidence of engineering that far surpasses our own[3][4]. Uncanny coincidences that do not make sense[5] but readily integrate into our myths surround us[6] and are often destroyed by us[7].

So what really is the best way to figure out our past? As with most things, accountability over a long period of time. Humans have trouble keeping history straight over even a few decades. Knowledge lost to out of date customs, or just plain language idiosyncrasies[8] can make even the recent past opaque to most.

Even the Epic of Gilgamesh seems to be tampered with: statues of the bull-rider (Enkidu) predate the tablets by many, many years, from before Gilgamesh's reign.

We've found that dogs were domesticated over a long period of time. That means there were many, many accidents along the way. Even Woolly Mammoth bones found under cliffs meant there were very intelligent hunters among us. Even the fact that a species survived thousands of years of sub-zero temperatures should stop us in awe. We live in the Holocene, which seems to be life on easy mode: good temperatures, just enough CO2 and conditions favorable to analog information archiving, enabling civilization, hard industry and easy transport, with an easily targetable animal population.

This is what I think is true: at some point, the human(oid?)s living in sync with their environment were disrupted by another group, and this group was so fundamentally alien to whatever the norm was, that it quickly conquered most of the planet. Its superiority in numbers seems to have been great enough to enable similar outcomes for groups separated by great distances. Most of the evidence points to that group being us, that we likely genocided many, many humanoid races just to get here.

Here's a poem that I like, that seems to convey similar emotion: https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poem/poems_copybook.htm

And at the risk of making this entire post sound like satire (it's not), here's some links to the Finno-Korean Hyperwar of 8245BC[9][10][11][12]

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2005/feb/19/science.scie...

[2]: http://web.archive.org/web/20220516153818/http://johnhawks.n...

[3]: https://www.gizapower.com/Advanced/Advanced%20Machining.html

[4]: https://www.ancient-origins.net/ancient-places-africa/egypt-...

[5]: http://ancientmoons.com/trees.html

[6]: https://www.ancient-origins.net/myths-legends/dragons-explor...

[7]: https://www.ancient-origins.net/myths-legends-asia/dragon-te...

[8]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bar_joke#cite_note-1

[9]: https://vixra.org/pdf/1809.0081v1.pdf

[10]: https://old.reddit.com/r/AlternateHistory/comments/nba85t/to...

[11]: https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/2007541-his

[12]: https://old.reddit.com/r/imaginarymaps/comments/puryu1/euras...