Hi orda,
I have not.
But a few points:
1. Knowledge of the heavens was necessary once societies learnt how to farm and decided to stay in a single place. The Babylonians knew a great deal about the sky. They knew about the 5 visible planets. They knew roughly the length of a year: their circles had 360 degrees and their years had 360 days. The folks who built Stonehenge probably knew similar things, judging by the attention they paid to the placement of their rocks in relation to the movement of the sun. The civilisations of the Americas also knew a fair amount about these things.
2. Basic stone age technology was widespread. People constructed furnaces, made pots, created tools from flint, learnt how to plough, ground cereals, baked bread, built robust houses etc from an early period.
3. Explaining the universe, they framed things with reference to what they knew.
4. So not surprisingly, since they knew much the same things, the stories contain coincidences. One reason I shared the Hopi creation story was because it provides an example of a society segregated from the Middle East since pre-historic times. And yet once again, the story involves the construction of man from clay - like the Sumerian myths and like the story of the creation of Adam in the Bible. This can only be for reasons of coincidence. The Hopis ended up in North America long before the Sumerian civilisation began. Similarly, the use of mill stones was common from quite an early period.
5. I should not be surprised to find that there were earlier civilisations which could not write and that made their buildings from materials which washed away or collapsed and who supplied knowledge to several cultures. There are some very old sites which have survived: Gobekli Tepe in Turkey is 12,000 years old. And perhaps the groups of inhabitants from places like this passed their knowledge along - and so various subsequent civilisations adopted them.
6. In linguistic terms, Indo-European civilisations share roots in words like "papa" (or something like it) for father. I don't see why something similar would not apply to myths and to knowledge. The account in the first book of Genesis derives many features from Middle Eastern mythology, including from the Enuma Elish. And like Moses, the baby Sargon (who ended up becoming the Akkadian king) wound up in a basket amongst the bullrushes. But in these kinds of cases, the proximity makes me think the mythology passed from one culture to another along the fertile crescent.
7. So do their myths have some sort of involvement with the movements of the heavens. Yes, to some extent. In particular, I think this is true of the Sumerian peoples. Their Gods were associated with the stars.
8. But I haven't the knowledge to speculate about a really sophisticated, pre-existing civilisation. I doubt it, myself. I think it would be obvious in some way or another. The residue would have been discovered in some form or another. The Sumerians most likely represent the beginnings of large-scale civilisation.
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