There appears little doubt that iron or nickel steel from iron meteors made the tools necessary. What happened to them?
In the thousands of years following the tools (which were made of invaluable iron) were melted down to make other tools and so the original stone shaping and cutting tools disappeared. Now there is nothing left.
So the silly people following the dictum of Gradualism could not admit that there was not a steady progression from stone to copper, to bronze, to iron, to steel. And here we are with their nonsensical conclusions.
Sort of like the Sumerian Civilization springing mysteriously up from nothing with a complete alphabet, writing, astronomy, mathematics, navigation, bureaucracy, trading system, etc overnight.
Like Galileo inventing the telescope when there is abundant evidence that optically ground diopter lens were in use as far back as the Egyptian Old Kingdom; telescopes were likely in use during Roman times. Today these lens are just curiosities stuffed into some musty back of the museum display case labeled ‘Jewelry’. “Move along,” says the tour guide, “just pretty pieces, ancient eye candy. Now look over here at these beautifully crafted copper tools ...” and so it goes.
That is wacky - the Sumerians get about a half paragraph in the school books, then they move on.
Years ago I reached some of the same conclusions on my own, “great minds...” ha ha. It seems to me that some sort of cataclysm befalls humankind. It seems plenty of evidence that humankind is much older than popularly believed or suspected.
On the other hand it seems strange that North America doesn’t have any megalith structures or artifacts or anything whatsoever. Pretty big chunk of real estate. Even just a couple few hundred years ago it was virtually uninhabited. No disrespect intended to the Indian, just sayin’. That boggles my mind, to think of the centuries that went by - no matter how old one thinks the Sphinx or Great Pyramids are or any of those sites - 5,000 or 10,000 years, one big empty continent, for all practical purposes.