Neither Michael Shermer nor Graham Hancock are archaeologists, so I'm not sure where you're going with that. If you're asking me which one to trust without crit

Neither Michael Shermer nor Graham Hancock are archaeologists, so I'm not sure where you're going with that. If you're asking me which one to trust without critical reading (neither), I'm certainly not going to recommend the ancient aliens dude who's been repeatedly called out by multiple archaeological associations for publishing pseudoscience. Anyway, part of the issue here is that archaeology doesn't have answers to every question you could ask and the farther back you go, the harder it is to answer even basic questions. And ultimately, the archaeological community as a whole is still coming to grips with trying to understand how the people we do see in the archaeological record conceived of the world, which is a necessary prerequisite to start talking about how concepts in it relate to concepts in our own. Take this 2019 paper trying to survey how we understand the term 'home' [1] or Maher's Hunter-Gatherer Home-Making? as examples of some of how primitive our current working vocabulary and methodologies are on this topic. Our understanding of paleolithic lifeways is still very much in its infancy. Nevertheless, suggestions like the presence of a industrialized society much like our own before the LGM is something I've seen no evidence to even hint at yet. [1] https://doi.org/10.1086/701523 https://doi.org/10.1086/701523