Forgot to include the huge advances in satellite imaging using LIDAR and GPR which is uncovering lost cities all over South and Central America. Part of the problem in the past is we just did not have the tools to look beyond the obvious or what the naked eye can see. Now we are acquiring some of what is need to see into the distant past of human civilization.
But the ice cities of the Neanderthals melted and can never be found :)
However, the comet strikes of 10800 BC is now being heavily researched and many previous mysteries are being solved: why did the mega-fauna disappear? what happened to the Clovis peoples? how did the Younger Dryas (real climate change) start and end?
Graham Hancock’s “America Before” has a section on what it might have been like to have lived through the strikes which likely lasted 100 years; to us, it would be unimaginable horror. But it does explain the worldwide pre-history obsession with astronomy
SC: Time for you to post Firestone et al.