We know from rock cutting and ancient stone artefacts all over the world that some civilisation existed thousands of years ago that could do this. The questions are when, where and who, and what happened to them.
Let’s start with when. They stopped building suddenly. You can see this clearly in Egypt. In the Serapeum some of the granite boxes are not finished and one is still in a corridor. The Osirion and third pyramid at Giza are unfinished. In South America some stone constructions appear to have been destroyed by earthquakes. As these constructions where found by the Egyptians and Incas, it is reasonable to assume they were built in the period before this, not 100,000 years or more ago.
The cause of cessation of building work must have been sudden. And we know of a cataclysm that could have caused this and made Earth very inhospitable – the younger dryas impact. Add to this that a few of the Egyptian stone vases were found in burials dated to 14500 yrs BP and it is reasonable to assume 12800yrs BP as the end of the civilisation. A question mark surrounds some of the Egyptian granite statues purporting to be of pharaohs dated to dynastic periods. More research is needed on the accuracy of cutting but Chris Dunn reckons they were machined. And we don’t know of any comparable natural disaster since the end of the younger dryas.
As to where, one only need to consider Egypt and South America to conclude it was a global civilisation. But it existed alongside stone age cultures. There is no evidence of habitations for large numbers of people associated with the very ancient constructions we know of. It is possible that their main centres of civilisation are now below sea level, with only a few people elsewhere. But in any event we can conclude that this civilisation did not spread into the stone age cultures. It remained separate. Neither did its technology spread. They must have used metals to construct machines to manipulate hard stone the way they did. But they must also have guarded their metal technologies very carefully. If they had been making metal the way we have with smelting of ores it would have been obvious to other humans who would have experimented long before the iron age. The only way I can imagine them keeping the technology secret is if it was viewed as magic by stone age humans. Could this be where the concept of alchemy arose if cold fusion and transmutation of elements was the source of metals, not ore smelting?
So the picture we have is of a highly advanced civilisation living alongside a stone age civiisation. In those places the highly advanced civilisation wished to build, like Egypt, stone age humans must have known and interacted with the highly advanced civilisation in various ways. Paralells we can imagine are the cargo cult tribes in Pacific islands and the British Empire, but the separation between the civlisations must have been more extreme. You would expect stories about this to come down through the generations and the only stories we know of that might fit the bill are stories about the pantheons of gods from various areas of the world.
As to who the highly advanced civilisation were, there are only two options. One is that they were part of the homo genus, homo sapiens, denisova or another offshoot we don’t know about. The other option is that they were DNA-based aliens who knew a lot more about space travel than we do. If they developed their technology on earth, they must have been isolated from other homos or their smelting technology would have spread to those other homos. You can’t go straight to fusion technologies to create metals as far as we know. It is a natural process but you need to create a tornado to do it. It’s taken us a bit under 10,000 years to go from stone age to reasonably high technology, so there is time. But where on the earth could they have been sufficiently isolated, given we know homo erectus could sail to islands out of sight of the coast? There aren’t any suitable land masses in the Pacific; even Australia was accessible to homos 80.000 years ago. Mid Atlantic might be a possibility if tectonic plates have moved sufficiently, as in the theory for Atlantis mentioned on this website. A sunken land would also hide the mining and other major landform alterations. such as we have caused in technologically growing up.
The problems with postulating aliens are our current understanding of spacetime and the limit on our lifespan which rather precludes spending decades in space. Were either of these to be different aliens become a possibility.
As to what happened to them, the younger dryas comet impact must have decimated human populations. Supposing the highly advanced civilisation to be capable of global travel, they would have been able to move to areas least affected. But they didn’t re-start building constructions on which they had expended much energy, such as the Serapeum, when conditions improved. If they were aliens they would have been able to move off planet, assuming they had maintained their space transportation.