"[Men] lived like gods without sorrow of heart, remote and free from toil and grief: miserable age rested not on them; but with legs and arms never failing they made merry with feasting beyond the reach of all devils. When they died, it was as though they were overcome with sleep, and they had all good things; for the fruitful earth unforced bare them fruit abundantly and without stint. They dwelt in ease and peace."
The last ice age ended about 9200 years before Plato was writing. He was 2500 years closer to events than we are, and therefore about 21% better informed, I suppose.
This means you have to have hunter-gatherers hanging around the Mediterranean at about 9600 BC to observe events, and they have to be rowing out in canoes (if not Atlantean helicopters) in order to be familiar with the alleged drowned island, and then pass on the history through thousands of years of verbal tradition to the pre-dynastic ancient Egyptians, who can (much later) tell the Greeks. It's possible, but an alternative explanation is no.
Göbekli Tepe is direct evidence of an advanced society over 11k years ago.
Humans are story tellers. Stories last a long time. The youngest fossils of Megalania, which grew up to 7 meters (23 feet) in length and weighing over 600 kg (1,300 lbs), which is the largest terrestrial lizard known to have ever lived, date to around 50,000 years ago, confirming that it was alive when the first Aboriginal people arrived in Australia. Early human inhabitants and the giant lizards would have shared the same environment, and Aboriginal oral traditions about giant goannas may be based on these ancient encounters.
That's an interesting thing, but all the same, Plato's myths aren't history in any sense, and mistaking them for that is not an error of degree but of type.
What happened to the "may"? So the story is about the "Whowie". It says here it also had six legs and the head of a frog. Based on a true story, maybe.
Do you have a suspect for the Bunyip, by the way? I like that one.
I shamelessly edited several times, it may add up better now. And no of course this isn't how things work, the emphasis is on the nine thousand years or whatever the correct extremely large time interval is.
Plato was neither a historian nor an archeologist, he had no way to know anything about the remote past. He made up and repeated myths, which you can impute whatever meanings you like onto, but you should try not to mistake them for a history even if they accidentally fit cherry-picked examples.
"[Men] lived like gods without sorrow of heart, remote and free from toil and grief: miserable age rested not on them; but with legs and arms never failing they made merry with feasting beyond the reach of all devils. When they died, it was as though they were overcome with sleep, and they had all good things; for the fruitful earth unforced bare them fruit abundantly and without stint. They dwelt in ease and peace."
Myths of pre ice age life were spoken of by plato