system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
[Almost every sci-fi story] How come ancient civilizations or ancient technologies are often more advanced than recent ones?

There is a common trope that whenever there is the word "ancient", it is possible that the civilisation or technology is way more advanced than the current ones.

This ranges from old supernatural artifacts such as the Ark of the Covenant or the Holy Grail in Indiana Jones which is surprising that nobody ever thought of even studying its effects to hopefully replicate its effects, whether it is by people during the Renaissance era or the Enlightenment era where scientific thought had increased, or even the modern era where technology is way more advanced.

Sometimes this even involves ancient civilisations *(similar to popular story of Atlantis)* such in the Halo Lore, ancient humans were way more advanced in technology and civilisations, or in Wolfenstein the New Order, the Da'at Yichud is an ancient secret society that made technologies way more advanced than everything else and yet nobody who ever come in contact with one never actually thought of mass-producing these technologies and sell them to the public

Or even more powerful entities such as in the Digimon Frontier series, the most powerful Digievolution of every hero Digimon in the show has the word "Ancient" on it, or the Primal Zerg in the planet Zerus which is known to be the birthworld of the Zerg is apparently much stronger than the current Zerg race such as every time they actually eat an organism, they immediately evolve and inherit the traits of that organism 


This kind of goes opposite to how evolution works *(in a general and simple manner because evolution is not exactly a ladder of progression but more like a big tree with lots of branches)* or even history *(again, in a general manner too because some civilisations in history had technologies that we are still not exactly sure how they worked that and are somehow more advanced than current technologies such as Roman concrete, Damascus steel, the Antikythera mechanism, an apparent 2000-year old earthquake detector invented by Zhang Heng, and probably ever other gathered information in the Library of Alexandria until it was burned down by Julius Caesar)*
gpt
The universe is approximately 13 billion years old. 

Recorded History is approximately 5,000 years old. 

So , take all of our recorded history, and Multiply that by 2.6 million and you get how old the universe is.  Or another way of saying were are knowledgeable about our tiny earth for 1 in 2.6 million of the time the universe is around.

So that is the answer to your question, how every ancient civilization is more advanced, we truly haven't be around long enough to advance.  Give Earth another million years and we should progress some more if we don't kill each other first.