This has been on my mind a lot lately. The trade goods recovered from certain Dynastic-era sites don't fully match anything we can trace back to known neighbouring civilisations, and that gap bothers me more the longer I sit with it.
There's also the linguistic angle - a few researchers have flagged some proto-hieroglyphic symbols that appear in coastal regions where there's no archaeological explanation for how they got there. Could be coincidence. Could also be contact with a seafaring culture that left almost no other footprint.
I spent some time last year going through records from a dig site near Luxor (not my own fieldwork, just published material) and the material culture descriptions made me wonder whether we're even asking the right questions when we frame everything around "known" civilisations.
Do you think the problem is that we're still anchored too heavily to the existing map of ancient cultures? What if there were trading networks or even permanent settlements that simply haven't survived in any recoverable form? Would love to hear what others here think, especially anyone whos looked into the pre-Dynastic period specifically.