I will take the route that is different from all of these. You are free to disagree with me if you want. I believe the scale is the opposite: The original people had extremely advanced technology and were not chipping stone like that. They had knife technology that is greater than what we presently have: They could slice matter with a mere thought if they desired to do so. In addition to that, they had advanced ceramic composites, adamantine metals that were formed through alchemical (nuclear and subquantum transmutation), and shatter-proof pure crystal blades that made use of what modern chemists call "Theoretical Strengths" of a perfect solid.
Why then, you may ask, do our archaeologists find deposits of hand-knapped stone-edged tools? Easy. After the period of extreme technological advancement, our ancient forebears had their entire civilization collapsed, and their descendents had to rebuild, nearly from scratch. As they spread around, and were scattered, some retained and redeveloped more advanced technologies than others; some lived in caves and knapped stone while others began to again smelt metals and cast bronze, and then learned how to forge iron, and finally steel. In this view, there was no "Paleolithic" or "Neolithic", there was no "Bronze age" and "Iron Age" and "Stone Age". That is all myth and legend of modern people attempting to impress their preconceived ideas onto our ancient ancestors.
Furthermore, many of the alleged "religious objects" that have made their way into museums and private collections, are in truth, advanced ancient technologies, that are so advanced and so sublime in their power capacity, that we have no way of utilizing them to their full power, because we lack the interfaces to access them. That "ritual vase" you see there in the British Museum, or that "toy wheel" you see over in the collection of some millionaire, is in truth an ancient super computer and if you were to examine it with the proper technologies at the subatomic and molecular level, you would find something that would make the greatest modern engineers gasp in awe.
One time I got into a drawn-out discussion with a professor over this very topic. He told me "If the ancients had these advanced technologies as you say, where is all their garbage?" "Garbage?", I asked, "What do you mean garbage? These people were not like we moderns with our crude primitive centralized factories, injection molds, and other bulk technologies that leave heaps of waste material. These ancient people grew fully-formed crystalline structures with focused electroplasmic points of force, generated directly from the very quantum neutrino sea itself. There was no garbage. There were no land fills for them. Want some proof? Easy. Get yourself a ticket to Puma Punku in Bolivia. Tell me those people were hand carving stone to make those tight-fitted stone structures and monoliths. Go get yourself a look at the diorite vases in various Egyptology collections and tell me those people were not capable of advanced machining. They had ultrasonic diamond cutting saws that were machine-powered, at the least. Even the finest modern machinists with diamond-coated saws are unable to replicate such granite and diorite structures."
Go see the machined structures of Puma Punku:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumapunku