10,000 years 'seems' like a long time but it is barely a sneeze in the grand scheme.

Imagine hunting, finding food, eating till full, moving on, then doing it all again tomorrow. Then one day someone picked up some berries or a piece of meat and took it with them. They ate then hunted and found out it was better to hunt when the tummy didn't hurt so much. The ate and brought some food to the others. Some of the nuts fell on the ground and after a time started to grow.
Someone put a nut on the ground and it rooted and they saw it looked like the baby plants they saw near the ones they fed on. At the point they made the connection they had a renewable food source and the farming began. His na...

10,000 years 'seems' like a long time but it is barely a sneeze in the grand scheme.

Imagine hunting, finding food, eating till full, moving on, then doing it all again tomorrow. Then one day someone picked up some berries or a piece of meat and took it with them. They ate then hunted and found out it was better to hunt when the tummy didn't hurt so much. The ate and brought some food to the others. Some of the nuts fell on the ground and after a time started to grow.
Someone put a nut on the ground and it rooted and they saw it looked like the baby plants they saw near the ones they fed on. At the point they made the connection they had a renewable food source and the farming began. His name was BOB and he had 17 wives 23 children and 31 brothers and sisters. He never went to school or church and he was a fashion statement of the day. If you looked into his eyes at that moment, you would see a twinkle of thought.

Tools made of wood, horn and bone decay, and stone tools may not look like much outside of the context of handles. Metals rust away - if they weren't recycled.

Fired clay persists - but you have to find the midden, which is probably buried deeply, under ten thousand years of dust, sand, forest litter, etc.

There are only a few areas where you are likely to find evidence of civilization - deserts and other marginal lands - and obviously, those aren't the first choices for people to live in.Go any place where it's easy to live - coastal regions with abundant forests - and it's unlikely that you will find good sources of stone nearby, or any very good reason to do much building with it.

The...

Tools made of wood, horn and bone decay, and stone tools may not look like much outside of the context of handles. Metals rust away - if they weren't recycled.

Fired clay persists - but you have to find the midden, which is probably buried deeply, under ten thousand years of dust, sand, forest litter, etc.

There are only a few areas where you are likely to find evidence of civilization - deserts and other marginal lands - and obviously, those aren't the first choices for people to live in.Go any place where it's easy to live - coastal regions with abundant forests - and it's unlikely that you will find good sources of stone nearby, or any very good reason to do much building with it.

Then of course, structures made of stone are far better quarries than actual quarries. It's easier to build using existing structures as raw material than haul in new stuff - and of course it means you don't have to haul so much rubble away, either.

Any useful tools would be used until worn out - and then recycled. This is especially true of bronze and copper tools.

When you think of it, its amazing that any evidence of civilization remains at all, and our ideas of what they were like and how civilized they were is probably laughable - even for fairly recent and well-documented civilizations, such as Egypt, as our best records of this - or most cultures - is based mainly on funeral goods, monumental records and garbage.

I wonder what that will say about us, in a couple-three thousand years.