I can't source it, though perhaps others will, but I remember from discussions on the original WoTMB Jordan is supposed to have established that the First Age ended with Tamyrlin discovering the One Power and ushering in the AoL. The nice thing for authors like Jordan and Tolkien who want to indulge the conceit of a prehistoric high culture is that there's precedent in tales of Lemuria and Atlantis, and room for all because of the vast time span between the first homo sapiens and the Agricultural Revolution. Even the most conservative anthropological estimates I've heard put the first true humans at least 100,000-200,000 years in the past, yet the first permanent settlements around active agriculture, the dawn of civilization, only date from the last 10,000 years. And even mindsets that may reject that usually accept a Deluge that virtually eradicated all human civilization, reducing the species, at whatever level it had attained, back to the Stone Age.

In other words, plenty of time for humanity to rise from primitive hunter gatherers, little better than rational animals, to the Space Age--ten times over! The possibilities are endlessly fascinating for a creative mind; it's an open question even now how far human culture can advance before a natural or artificial cataclysm too great for it might produce another Dark Age. Against that background the Breaking is not only plausible, but natural, and the biggest challenges to verisimilitude are geological rather than historical.

That's what makes such worlds so intriguing, and Jordans in particular, because his presents an eternal cycle in which almost anything is possible because of infinite time for increasing variation (remember, each Age repeats itself, but the Age Lace formed allows ever more latitude to the actors each time an Age returns. ) Randland is both past and future of, at the very least, a parallel Earth, the conceit being that the events of the Third Age are SO ancient as to be "faded to myth" now so that it may be "forgotten" ere the Dragon is again Reborn. That the Ogier are constructs make it more rather than less likely they're the result of genetic engineering, mutation from radiation, or possibly both. The one thing we know from history, and that is central to Randland and the genre to which it belongs, is that great cataclysms bring great change, in part because they largely or wholly eliminate the knowledge and substance of development that only reached so high slowly and painfully over vast amounts of time. The Third Age of the books could thus be one in which greater deviation in our own or subsequent Ages make fundamental changes from the very nature of reality in the previous Third Age--or one in which such deviations in the Third Age account for critical differences between our own Age and the last such in the Age Lace.