Rebuilding was probably impossible, you are grossly underestimating the natural power of the planet. A worldwide storm is no joke, we could live on Mars sure, but what if the Earth was turned into a Martian environment in a year due to some cataclysm? How many of us would survive?
The memes about ancient humans have to be pushed back into the millions of years, but it makes sense in this context:
Earth is not the true birthplace of sentience/intelligence, just an abandoned colony.
Much like today if something happens to the Antarctic ice shelf we lose contact with one of our research stations there, and maybe they all die before they can get out, and it would take us days to send rescue helicopters to them if any survive. If in the distant past, millions of years ago, some alien things had a research outpost on Earth and it was destroyed due to a freak accident, they may have lost all contact and gone native in isolation, started fucking with the genetics of monkeys, started empires, wars with each other, if they had no capacity to rebuild their damaged ships and go back home, and if help was thousands of years away at best… you might end up with what we see on the planet today.
Five or Six aliens each staking out a region of the planet's landmass and playing a real world civ simulator, from evolution to empire.
If their biology is different than our own and they can live for very long periods of time, this would be one way to stave off the boredom waiting for rescue.
22,000 years ago their rescue arrive, they said fuck it and buried the planet under ice, hoping to cleanse or undo the mistake that was intervention with human evolution. Earth was marked as 'potentially unstable for research purposes' and they fucked off somewhere else to do their exploration. But a small pocket of humans survived and rebuilt in hopes of mimicking their creators. You see this asymmetry in the human species because it did not evolve naturally, clearly green/blue eyes and fair hair is superior in every way to the rest of mankind (beauty, creativity, intelligence) and brown eyes and dark hair is shit-tier genetics. It's crazy how nobody mentions that 'African-Americans' are just a modern slave-race created by primitive eugenics, bred for speed, strength and low intelligence. Clearly swathes of Asians were bred since prehistory for obedience and servitude, working hard and shutting the fuck up. And the northern whites were bred for conquest and expansion, that's how a tiny fucking number of vikings ended up exploring and ruling the entire world.
This is not a coincidence, it's fuckery inside the genetics of these different people. In the case of fake people like American blacks, it's just a human driven experiment at making a decent slave. In the case of ancient people throughout history, it's obviously a lineage dating back to some far older time, before accepted civilizations.
