The human race suffers from global amnesia. Contemporary archaeology would have you believe that modern humans -- homo sapiens sapiens -- evolved no more than 250,000 years ago (most would say about 160,000 years or even less) and that modern technology began to evolve with recorded history, about 5-6,000 years ago. They would tell you that each culture is more advanced than the one that came before it and we are the most advanced culture the world has seen.
But an open-minded investigation into the evidence would suggest that the human race has been around much longer; perhaps millions of years. And those who preceded us may have developed technologies equal to or superior to our own, though vastly different in nature.
Technological evolution is not linear; it is cyclical. We've been here before; and if we don't want to repeat the mistakes of the past, we must learn from them.
See this YouTube Playlist for an introduction to the changing face of history and archaeology.