We are the lost ancient global civilization

I keep seeing conspiracy theories about some ancient lost global civilization, which ruled the world thousands of years ago.

But wouldn't that just be - us? Because we were a global civilization, and we did rule the world, until not so long ago. Arguably - well into the middle ages. So why make-up stories about Atlantis instead of looking at what archaeology can actually tell us about the past?

I may be reading too much into this, but it does feel to me like certain people are implying that there had to be some "superior" civilization who would have taught the brown folk how to be civilized. So just in case - let's start with the fact that humans may have only developed white skin as recently as ~6000 years ago, because it wasn't useful to have white skin before then.

You'll notice that our cousins the chimpanzees actually have light-color skin. It appears that we developed dark skin as an adaptation around a million years ago in Africa, after losing our fur. And it wasn't until people migrated far north, especially with the expansion of agriculture to Europe around 6000 years ago, that they had to develop white skin again in order to get enough vitamin D from the sun.

So if you're contemplating a more ancient global civilization than just a few thousands of years ago - it has to be black, brown, aliens or lizard-people.

What we do know, though, is that humans pretty much always moved around and always traded with each other. You know those prehistoric cave-paintings all over the world? People used ochre for red paint, and studies show that they've been mining it, carrying it great distances, trading it and gifting it to each other for tens of thousands of years.

We also exchanged amber and shells for a very long time, and once the stone-age has ended - copper and tin.

Globalization was at its height in the bronze-age, with well-established trade routes, related financial and judicial institution, multi-lingual merchants and cosmopolitan cities.

Around 1200 BCE several important empires collapsed and some of the trading routes collapsed with them. But others survived up to and throughout the middle ages, connecting Asia and Africa, and to an extent Europe as well.

Recently a ship-wrack from 3300 years ago was found deep in the Mediterranean sea, with cargo from the middle east. This suggests that the ancient merchants were sailing much further from shore than previously assumed, relying on advanced navigation techniques.

So yeah, fascinating stuff if you're really interested in ancient civilizations. And as I said - not sure why conspiracy theories about long-lost-global-civilizations are even necessary, given how globalized we pretty much always have been.