You are not comparing the same types of thing. Similarity in style by those conditioned or trained similarly would be expected.
What is less reasonable is the total abandonment of prior training and cultural influences. Take any group of 100 artists in any medium. Train those artists in an art form contrary to one they know. Even if their first attempts are pure mimicry, eventually, their prior experiences begin to color their output.
Let us say you go to India and learn to play the sitar. What people are asking us to believe is that after learning to play the sitar, nothing distinct from your guitar performance will ever make it into your music again.
The reverse is also true. When people of disparate cultures interact with other cultural influences, their culture adapts to new influences. Most of us know that it is not easy to find US style pizza in Italy, fortune cookies in China, California rolls in Japan, US style Mexican food in Mexico, etc.
This is not a case of someone making a piece of art that looks a bit like some other piece of art. What we have here is the claim that God’s chosen people, after being saved from world-wide destruction, spread across the face of the planet. Then, where they found the remains of pagan cultures, they adopt them wholly and in every case abandon their previous culture and belief in God. Further, they adopt the tools of the new culture and stop using the tools of their previous culture (even when those tools are more advanced).
Even were someone to stumble across the art of another, it is at very least highly questionable that these travelers would trade in their familiar tools to take up strange unfamiliar ones. That they would switch over and use the same pigments, same clays, same stones, same chisels, same stone cutting techniques, same techniques for moving the stones, same proportions, same esthetics, and on and on. That they would do this strains credulity, that they would do this without introducing elements or tools from their own cultural background is as far as I know, completely unheard of.
Can you think of even one verifiable instance of this happening anywhere at anytime in all of the history of humankind, let alone over hundreds if not thousands of years?
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