XFiles: Was There a Civilization On Earth Before Humans?

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Introversion

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I want to believe... But probably not.

A look at the available evidence

The Atlantic said:
It only took five minutes for Gavin Schmidt to out-speculate me.

Schmidt is the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (a.k.a. GISS) a world-class climate-science facility. One day last year, I came to GISS with a far-out proposal. In my work as an astrophysicist, I’d begun researching global warming from an “astrobiological perspective.” That meant asking whether any industrial civilization that rises on any planet will, through their own activity, trigger their own version of a climate shift. I was visiting GISS that day hoping to gain some climate science insights and, perhaps, collaborators. That’s how I ended up in Gavin’s office.

Just as I was revving up my pitch, Gavin stopped me in my tracks.

“Wait a second,” he said. “How do you know we’re the only time there’s been a civilization on our own planet?”

It took me a few seconds to pick my jaw off the floor. I had certainly come into Gavin’s office prepared for eye rolls at the mention of “exo-civilizations.” But the civilizations he was asking about would have existed many millions of years ago. Sitting there, seeing Earth’s vast evolutionary past telescope before my mind’s eye, I felt a kind of temporal vertigo. “Yeah,” I stammered, “Could we tell if there’d been an industrial civilization that deep in time?”


We never got back to aliens. Instead, that first conversation launched a new study we’ve recently published in the International Journal of Astrobiology. Though neither of us could see it at that moment, Gavin’s penetrating question opened a window not just onto Earth’s past, but also onto our own future.

We’re used to imagining extinct civilizations in terms of the sunken statues and subterranean ruins. These kinds of artifacts of previous societies are fine if you’re only interested in timescales of a few thousands of years. But once you roll the clock back to tens of millions or hundreds of millions of years, things get more complicated.

When it comes to direct evidence of an industrial civilization—things like cities, factories, and roads—the geologic record doesn’t go back past what’s called the Quaternary period 2.6 million years ago. For example, the oldest large-scale stretch of ancient surface lies in the Negev Desert. It’s “just” 1.8 million years old—older surfaces are mostly visible in cross section via something like a cliff face or rock cuts. Go back much farther than the Quaternary and everything has been turned over and crushed to dust.

And, if we’re going back this far, we’re not talking about human civilizations anymore. Homo sapiens didn’t make their appearance on the planet until just 300,000 years or so ago. That means the question shifts to other species, which is why Gavin called the idea the Silurian hypothesis, after an old Dr. Who episode with intelligent reptiles.


So, could researchers find clear evidence that an ancient species built a relatively short-lived industrial civilization long before our own? Perhaps, for example, some early mammal rose briefly to civilization building during the Paleocene epoch about 60 million years ago. There are fossils, of course. But the fraction of life that gets fossilized is always minuscule and varies a lot depending on time and habitat. It would be easy, therefore, to miss an industrial civilization that only lasted 100,000 years—which would be 500 times longer than our industrial civilization has made it so far.

...
 

MaeZe

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I always find this kind of speculation, along with the panspermia hypotheses come from people who have little to zero knowledge about the discoveries in the field of genetics.

There is evidence against such ideas in the genetic history of Earth's lifeforms. It's like geologists' theories of earthquakes before they recognized plate tectonics.
 
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Brightdreamer

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Good speculation for fiction, though as for reality, I'm skeptical. (I wouldn't rule out the possibility of the potential for civilization - another life form having reached the level of organization and intelligence and tool use and such in our own ancestors, pre-H. sapiens - but getting to the level of tech required to leave evidence lasting long enough for us to discover...) But, like they mention, it's essentially impossible to be 100% sure without some manner of time travel. Certainly there's nothing magical about us as a species that couldn't have happened in some other life form before, or that will never happen in another life form again. Just the roll of the dice...

I do believe that we've lost a lot more than we may ever know insofar as human civilizations, cultural roots, and prehistory go.
 

Kjbartolotta

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Clearly the ancestors of our lizard-people overlords.

It's a fun thought experiment, and if the only point is to underscore how little we know about the deep past, then not a harmful one. Though the "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" argument can get one in a lot of trouble if applied improperly. But hey, I have fun with this kind of stuff, so who am I to judge? :)
 

Cyia

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Many, if not most cultures / religions believe that we're not the first incarnation of life on the planet, so it's hardly a new idea. Whether it's provable or not is another question. You can't really prove a negative.
 

Helix

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If they were really serious about a previous civilisation (which they're not), why not look at the most geologically stable continent?
 

amergina

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This is the science fact section, not the science speculation section. I'm going to lock this and see where it can be moved to.

Round Table has offered to host! So it's heading that way! Hang on!
 
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Ari Meermans

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<snip>
It's a fun thought experiment, and if the only point is to underscore how little we know about the deep past, then not a harmful one. Though the "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" argument can get one in a lot of trouble if applied improperly. But hey, I have fun with this kind of stuff, so who am I to judge? :)

I think it's a fun thought experiment, too. So let's leave the world of (currently) geologically provable science fact and enter the realm of imagination and speculation. One never knows where or how the next great spec fic idea will originate and articles such as this one can pierce the veil. Ideas do come from some unlikely places and y'all know that. (And we wouldn't have to limit ourselves to the Silurian hypothosis, either. just sayin')

If we were to speculate, during what period would such a civilization mostly likely have occurred? How might that civilization have risen? What are the known hazards of that period? (Other thoughts and criteria at your discretion.)



_______________

Special note: I may change the thread title, but if I do, it'll still be recognizable as the same thread. For now, I'ma leave as-is for at least a few days.
 

Albedo

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Eocene, Eohippus. Cos a civilisation of tiny horses. Let's assume a small branch of them went down a more omnivorous pathway, and adapted to a more arboreal lifestyle like early primates, keeping their multiple digits and developing thumbs. There's a hypothesis that living in trees leads to an increase in intelligence (c.f. the need to be able to navigate through a complex three dimensional environment, and be able to recognise a large number of different fruits, flowers, leaves, etc.), and so our adorable little tree horses got smart, developed an industrial civilisation, and promptly (on a geological scale) roasted themselves.
 

Brightdreamer

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Eocene, Eohippus. Cos a civilisation of tiny horses. Let's assume a small branch of them went down a more omnivorous pathway, and adapted to a more arboreal lifestyle like early primates, keeping their multiple digits and developing thumbs. There's a hypothesis that living in trees leads to an increase in intelligence (c.f. the need to be able to navigate through a complex three dimensional environment, and be able to recognise a large number of different fruits, flowers, leaves, etc.), and so our adorable little tree horses got smart, developed an industrial civilisation, and promptly (on a geological scale) roasted themselves.

I'd think a civilization of tiny horses would be very stable.

(I'll just leave now...)
 

Kjbartolotta

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Stromatolites had the planet to themselves for over two billion years. They're quite adaptable, and capable of acting in unison to enact complex survival strategies. Maybe there were more than dumb mats of bacteria and sediment. if you're willing to stay loose with you definition of 'civilization', I can imagine some pretty bizarre scenarios.
 

Ari Meermans

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Loose enough, I'd think, to include awareness, at least the beginnings of social structure, and working together toward a common(ish) goal such as mutual survival. This is an idea springboard, after all. <g>
 

Helix

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Stromatolites had the planet to themselves for over two billion years. They're quite adaptable, and capable of acting in unison to enact complex survival strategies. Maybe there were more than dumb mats of bacteria and sediment. if you're willing to stay loose with you definition of 'civilization', I can imagine some pretty bizarre scenarios.

There's a whole bunch of 'em still living at Hamelin Pool in Western Australia and they're not doing anything too exciting. Mind you, they're probably just waiting for us to go extinct before making their move.
 

neandermagnon

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I don't agree with the (usually unstated) assumption that civilisation is the hallmark of a highly intelligent species, or that civilisation is the thing we should be looking for as evidence of high intelligence.

Take humans for example. Neandertals appear to have had a level of intelligence that matched our own (and new evidence shows they did cave painting too, contrary to previously held beliefs about their lack of creativity). They lived from about 300,000 years ago (could be as early as 600,000 years ago depending on how you classify their immediate ancestors) until 28,000 years ago, and in all that time of being intelligent, complex-language-speaking, problem solving humans, did not start a civilisation.

Given that Homo sapiens and Neandertals have some identical adaptations for speech (hyoid bone and FOXP2 genes - identical, not just similar) it's much more likely that these were inherited from a common ancestor than that they're convergent evolution (convergent evolution tends to produce things that function the same way but are different). The common ancestor of Homo sapiens and Homo neandertalensis lived between 600,000 and 1,000,000 years ago (the former date suggested by archaeological remains of Homo heidelbergensis, the latter coming from studies that measure genetic divergence - the latter is probably more reliable) - other signs of high intelligence from these humans who lived 1,000,000 years ago include their ability to use fire and haft stone spearheads onto wooden spears - these would've been used for co-operative hunting of large animals. So you're talking about humans who spoke in a complex language, solved problems and co-operated with each other living 1,000,000 years ago. It's only in the last 10,000 years that there's any evidence that they stopped being hunter-gatherers and started building cities. Building cities is a necessity that arises due to higher population density. (Civilisation = cities, by definition). People didn't start building cities because they thought "let's build a great civilisation" - they started building them when the population got big and dense enough, with all of them wanting to live in the same place, that they needed to build a city. This is a knock-on effect from a move from hunting and gathering to agriculture on a large scale.

Looking at the world as it is today, there are remote places on Earth where people still live traditional hunter-gatherer lifestyles. They're all Homo sapiens sapiens like us, with the same amount of intelligence as us. A human hunter-gatherer, tool using, co-operative hunting kind of lifestyle takes the same amount of brains as living in a city (many would say it takes a lot more brains, or at least that it's a lot less forgiving of wilful stupidity). The main difference is the population size and the pool of knowledge they have to draw upon. Civilisation's great benefit is that you can access the combined knowledge of so many more people. Each individual within it is no cleverer than individuals in isolated hunter-gatherer populations. Due to statistics and probability, an individual with a rare, exceptionally high level of intelligence is more likely to be born into the larger population. But that doesn't make the rest of the population any cleverer, except by their ability to share the knowledge.

Civilisation is the result of high population density, a reaction to circumstance. It's not the hallmark of an intelligent species. Even if you only include humans after we evolved complex language, complex tools/technology use and problem solving abilities and a high degree of co-operation, the vast vast majority of those humans lived as hunter-gatherers and didn't build cities.

Is it possible there were earlier civilisations than 10,000 years ago? It's possible, but not probable, given population densities (generally very low) and the fact that there'd not only be evidence of the civilisation itself but also of all the various pre-civilisation phases (mesolithic and neolithic kind of lifestyles, with an increasing reliance on agriculture over time) and evidence of a growing population size/density. If you have that many people making complex things like buildings etc, it's more likely that something will survive.

The question of whether anything besides humans had (or currently has) human levels of intelligence is a more pertinent one. But looking for evidence of civilisation to prove this would be a huge error that would lead to missing a ton of other evidence.

We've systematically underestimated the intelligence of everything else on the planet including our ancestors and including living members of our own species (if you look at what some Victorians who called themselves scientists said about different ethnic groups and about women, and other bigotry) so it's not a far-fetched question. What if elephants, dolphins and corvids have as complex a language as ours, only we can't process it because it's not in our hearing range? I don't just mean the ability to hear the sounds, but our own ears and auditory parts of the brain have evolved to be especially sensitive to the different sounds that humans make, in the specific pitch range of human voices. If another species had the same language ability, but in a different pitch range with different types of noises, would our brains even be able to process enough of it to recognise it as language? To my knowledge, no-one has studied this.

The evidence we have so far suggests that quite a lot of branches of life's family tree have evolved intelligence levels equivalent to a chimpanzees. Human ancestors with the same intelligence level lived about 3 million years ago. So that's a lot of life that's only 3 million years away from human-level intelligence, given selection pressure in the right direction... and that's assuming that we haven't missed any signs that any are already closer than that. (Or that they're there already but we've just missed it because it doesn't look like civilisation.)

Could dinosaurs have evolved human-like intelligence? Traditionally, they were thought to be stupid, like birds, because their brains are too small. Except that recent studies on birds (corvids and parrots in particular) has shown that we got the brain size thing all wrong and that bird brains have got all the important things that are needed for intelligence, like ape brains have, only they're compacted into a smaller space and organised differently. And birds are descended from dinosaurs, so basically, we probably got dinosaur brains all wrong too. Deinonychus were social pack hunters, a bit like humans and wolves. They're on my "species that were most likely to have evolved human level of intelligence if the asteroid hadn't hit when it did" list. But it's kind of difficult to study signs of high intelligence in species that went extinct so many millions of years ago. It's hard enough to find it in Neandertals. It's taken this long to find indisputable evidence of Neandertal cave paintings.

I read a research paper a while back comparing Neandertal archaeological sites with some Homo sapiens ones from around 12,000 years ago, basically saying that the Homo sapiens ones also didn't show any evidence of any technology more advanced than the middle palaeolithic, but we know they must've had some, because they're descended from/related to Homo sapiens that had advanced upper palaeolithic technology. So we need to be careful not to automatically assume that the absence of evidence of a particular technology is hard proof that they didn't have it. Which leads me to this cartoon I drew a few years ago https://cavepeopleandstuff.wordpres...ly-happened-long-range-v-short-range-weapons/ people tend to assume that certain technologies are more advanced, sometimes with good reason (i.e. they're more complex to make) but you can't assume that any peoples' reason for not using that technology was because they didn't know how to. Maybe they had no use for it. Or, when it comes to the fossil record, maybe they did use it but no evidence of that use made it into the fossil record.

So anyway, if you can't get the full picture of technology use in archaeological sites from humans 12,000 years ago, and need to be really careful how we interpret evidence from Neandertals circa 40,000-100,000 years ago - where does that leave looking for high levels of intelligence in dinosaurs?

And going back to the original point... I think it probably is the case that high intelligence has evolved more often and at earlier (possibly much earlier) times than we realise, but it would be bloody hard to prove that point one way or another, due to massive limitations on what makes it into the fossil record. BUT if we limit our definition of intelligence to "civilisation" then we are setting ourselves up to miss a ton of evidence, because civilisation is not an inevitable consequence of high intelligence.
 

neandermagnon

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Stromatolites had the planet to themselves for over two billion years. They're quite adaptable, and capable of acting in unison to enact complex survival strategies. Maybe there were more than dumb mats of bacteria and sediment. if you're willing to stay loose with you definition of 'civilization', I can imagine some pretty bizarre scenarios.

This post wasn't there when I posted my post, but yeah it depends massively on how you define "civilisation" - the strict definition is that civilisation = cities/city based economy, with neolithic city-states considered to be the earliest examples.

The way "civilised" gets used in everyday speech is ethnocentric and unfair, seeing as modern hunter-gatherers are a lot more polite and considerate of other people and the land the inhabit than civilised people are. So much so I've been considering a cartoon for my blog, where a mother tells her children off saying "why can't you behave like civilised people?" at which point the children trash the place and play at being soldiers, saying they're wrecking the environment and starting wars, just like civilised people do. At this point the mother says "fine! That's not what I meant! Please behave like hunter-gatherers!" and the kids behave, look glum and say "huh, that means we have to be nice to each other... and respect the environment... and share our food!"

Something along those lines anyway....
 

Albedo

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I don't agree with the (usually unstated) assumption that civilisation is the hallmark of a highly intelligent species, or that civilisation is the thing we should be looking for as evidence of high intelligence.

Take humans for example. Neandertals appear to have had a level of intelligence that matched our own (and new evidence shows they did cave painting too, contrary to previously held beliefs about their lack of creativity). They lived from about 300,000 years ago (could be as early as 600,000 years ago depending on how you classify their immediate ancestors) until 28,000 years ago, and in all that time of being intelligent, complex-language-speaking, problem solving humans, did not start a civilisation.

Given that Homo sapiens and Neandertals have some identical adaptations for speech (hyoid bone and FOXP2 genes - identical, not just similar) it's much more likely that these were inherited from a common ancestor than that they're convergent evolution (convergent evolution tends to produce things that function the same way but are different). The common ancestor of Homo sapiens and Homo neandertalensis lived between 600,000 and 1,000,000 years ago (the former date suggested by archaeological remains of Homo heidelbergensis, the latter coming from studies that measure genetic divergence - the latter is probably more reliable) - other signs of high intelligence from these humans who lived 1,000,000 years ago include their ability to use fire and haft stone spearheads onto wooden spears - these would've been used for co-operative hunting of large animals. So you're talking about humans who spoke in a complex language, solved problems and co-operated with each other living 1,000,000 years ago. It's only in the last 10,000 years that there's any evidence that they stopped being hunter-gatherers and started building cities. Building cities is a necessity that arises due to higher population density. (Civilisation = cities, by definition). People didn't start building cities because they thought "let's build a great civilisation" - they started building them when the population got big and dense enough, with all of them wanting to live in the same place, that they needed to build a city. This is a knock-on effect from a move from hunting and gathering to agriculture on a large scale.

Looking at the world as it is today, there are remote places on Earth where people still live traditional hunter-gatherer lifestyles. They're all Homo sapiens sapiens like us, with the same amount of intelligence as us. A human hunter-gatherer, tool using, co-operative hunting kind of lifestyle takes the same amount of brains as living in a city (many would say it takes a lot more brains, or at least that it's a lot less forgiving of wilful stupidity). The main difference is the population size and the pool of knowledge they have to draw upon. Civilisation's great benefit is that you can access the combined knowledge of so many more people. Each individual within it is no cleverer than individuals in isolated hunter-gatherer populations. Due to statistics and probability, an individual with a rare, exceptionally high level of intelligence is more likely to be born into the larger population. But that doesn't make the rest of the population any cleverer, except by their ability to share the knowledge.
This was one of Jared Diamond's main points in Guns, Germs and Steel. He said that the smartest people he's ever met, in terms of adaptability and aptitude to learn new things, were highlanders from Papua New Guinea who'd had very limited contact with modern civilisation. The fact that civilisation developed in Eurasia and Mesoamerica at all is due to a series accidents of geography. I understand that Diamond's thesis is still controversial, but I don't really understand why. It's pretty comprehensively argued.

I'm also reminded of a story I heard from a health worker who'd been fortunate to visit a tribe in the PNG highlands that had only recently been integrated into the wider world (like, within the last twenty years), and who still lived the traditional lifestyle, and didn't have electricity or speak any English. Within a week of leaving their remote mountain village, one of the young men had added her on Facebook. She figured he must have hiked a hundred kilometres to the nearest village with internet access and pretty much figured out social media on his own.

Civilisation is the result of high population density, a reaction to circumstance. It's not the hallmark of an intelligent species. Even if you only include humans after we evolved complex language, complex tools/technology use and problem solving abilities and a high degree of co-operation, the vast vast majority of those humans lived as hunter-gatherers and didn't build cities.

Is it possible there were earlier civilisations than 10,000 years ago? It's possible, but not probable, given population densities (generally very low) and the fact that there'd not only be evidence of the civilisation itself but also of all the various pre-civilisation phases (mesolithic and neolithic kind of lifestyles, with an increasing reliance on agriculture over time) and evidence of a growing population size/density. If you have that many people making complex things like buildings etc, it's more likely that something will survive.

The question of whether anything besides humans had (or currently has) human levels of intelligence is a more pertinent one. But looking for evidence of civilisation to prove this would be a huge error that would lead to missing a ton of other evidence.

We've systematically underestimated the intelligence of everything else on the planet including our ancestors and including living members of our own species (if you look at what some Victorians who called themselves scientists said about different ethnic groups and about women, and other bigotry) so it's not a far-fetched question. What if elephants, dolphins and corvids have as complex a language as ours, only we can't process it because it's not in our hearing range? I don't just mean the ability to hear the sounds, but our own ears and auditory parts of the brain have evolved to be especially sensitive to the different sounds that humans make, in the specific pitch range of human voices. If another species had the same language ability, but in a different pitch range with different types of noises, would our brains even be able to process enough of it to recognise it as language? To my knowledge, no-one has studied this.

The evidence we have so far suggests that quite a lot of branches of life's family tree have evolved intelligence levels equivalent to a chimpanzees. Human ancestors with the same intelligence level lived about 3 million years ago. So that's a lot of life that's only 3 million years away from human-level intelligence, given selection pressure in the right direction... and that's assuming that we haven't missed any signs that any are already closer than that. (Or that they're there already but we've just missed it because it doesn't look like civilisation.)
Yes, and to paraphrase the late Douglas Adams, perhaps the dolphins look down on us because we're too dumb to live truly civilised lives, and keep mucking around on land with fire and shit.

It's incredible that real, actual scientists ever thought that animals are automatons. I mean, that's not just a category error, or inadequate observation. To deny the sapience of animals like cetaceans and corvids is beyond absurd, but what about domestic animals? Pigs are smart by any measure. Chickens aren't dumb. Yet we allow them to be treated like crap. We're terrible at recognising intelligence, let alone empathising with it if it doesn't look like us. How likely is it we'd recognise intelligence in the past, if it never reached the point it was altering the world's geology?

Could dinosaurs have evolved human-like intelligence? Traditionally, they were thought to be stupid, like birds, because their brains are too small. Except that recent studies on birds (corvids and parrots in particular) has shown that we got the brain size thing all wrong and that bird brains have got all the important things that are needed for intelligence, like ape brains have, only they're compacted into a smaller space and organised differently. And birds are descended from dinosaurs, so basically, we probably got dinosaur brains all wrong too. Deinonychus were social pack hunters, a bit like humans and wolves. They're on my "species that were most likely to have evolved human level of intelligence if the asteroid hadn't hit when it did" list. But it's kind of difficult to study signs of high intelligence in species that went extinct so many millions of years ago. It's hard enough to find it in Neandertals. It's taken this long to find indisputable evidence of Neandertal cave paintings.
Have you read Toolmaker Koan, by John McLoughlin? It's an unfairly obscure 80s hard SF novel that runs with this idea: Utahraptor-like dromaeosaurids built an industrial civilisation, and things like the K-Pg iridium boundary layer and evidence of declining biodiversity in the late Cretaceous are actually signs of their civilisation. The idea is that after 65 million years, any more concrete traces will have been erased, meaning that a tool-making species like humanity can never know whether they had predecessors (until an alien AI decides to resurrect the dinos, and hijinks ensue), but are extremely likely to follow the same pattern, and make themselves extinct.

I read a research paper a while back comparing Neandertal archaeological sites with some Homo sapiens ones from around 12,000 years ago, basically saying that the Homo sapiens ones also didn't show any evidence of any technology more advanced than the middle palaeolithic, but we know they must've had some, because they're descended from/related to Homo sapiens that had advanced upper palaeolithic technology. So we need to be careful not to automatically assume that the absence of evidence of a particular technology is hard proof that they didn't have it. Which leads me to this cartoon I drew a few years ago https://cavepeopleandstuff.wordpres...ly-happened-long-range-v-short-range-weapons/ people tend to assume that certain technologies are more advanced, sometimes with good reason (i.e. they're more complex to make) but you can't assume that any peoples' reason for not using that technology was because they didn't know how to. Maybe they had no use for it. Or, when it comes to the fossil record, maybe they did use it but no evidence of that use made it into the fossil record.

So anyway, if you can't get the full picture of technology use in archaeological sites from humans 12,000 years ago, and need to be really careful how we interpret evidence from Neandertals circa 40,000-100,000 years ago - where does that leave looking for high levels of intelligence in dinosaurs?

And going back to the original point... I think it probably is the case that high intelligence has evolved more often and at earlier (possibly much earlier) times than we realise, but it would be bloody hard to prove that point one way or another, due to massive limitations on what makes it into the fossil record. BUT if we limit our definition of intelligence to "civilisation" then we are setting ourselves up to miss a ton of evidence, because civilisation is not an inevitable consequence of high intelligence.
I can imagine a long-series of intelligent beings arising one by one, perhaps every 3 million years or so, existing in a palaeolithic steady state, and eventually going extinct without ever developing 'civilisation'. But if each lasts a million years or more, who's to measure success? Maybe, by burning out early, we're the failures.
 

Dennis E. Taylor

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Depending on how advanced a civilization got, I would expect it to do things like mine metals and drill for oil. I believe the precursors for oil and coal were laid down in the carboniferous, and there really hasn't been another equivalent period. So only one chance for those.

Metal deposits would be renewed over geological timescales as the surface of the planet is recycled, but again, pretty long time to wait for more iron deposits.

So if we're to posit an intelligent civilization of meerkats, it'd have to be non-industrial.
 

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Stonehenge was built by preliterate peoples, that it is a fairly sophisticated calendar, and that it require massive amounts of cooperation and engineering skill. I think those Neolithic peoples absolutely had a civilization and one with sophisticated trading and crafting skills. See also the cultures and peoples that built Brú na Bóinne/ Newgrange

I'm looking at this definition of civilization from the American Heritage Dictionary:

1. An advanced state of intellectual, cultural, and material development in human society, marked by progress in the arts and sciences, the extensive use of record-keeping, including writing, and the appearance of complex political and social institutions.
 

sideshowdarb

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What AW Admin said. There was a high degree of industry and understanding among early peoples, to the point a human civilization pre-dating any in recorded history is likely. There's enough anecdotal evidence in the myths of Noah, Gligamesh and Atlantis to lend weight to the idea there was some level of civilization in and around the Mediterranean before the end of the last ice age. The trauma of the floods that occurred with the melting of the ice and the rising of the seas is reflected in these myths, and any existing coastal cities would have been destroyed. There's speculation about the true age of the Sphinx, and that its base features water erosion damage. The last time there was any water around the Sphinx would have been around 10,000 years ago, at the end of the ice age. I'm not up to date on that research though. Fun to speculate.
 

Kjbartolotta

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There's a whole bunch of 'em still living at Hamelin Pool in Western Australia and they're not doing anything too exciting. Mind you, they're probably just waiting for us to go extinct before making their move.

Ha, not right now! Their age is sadly passed, the current incarnation lacks their forebearers complexity.

My own 'speculation' of a stromatolite civilization would probably include some form of tool using and record-keeping, though nothing immediately analogous to our own. But since this is all a flight of fancy & nothing that actually occurred, I won't get too far into describing it.

What AW Admin said. There was a high degree of industry and understanding among early peoples, to the point a human civilization pre-dating any in recorded history is likely. There's enough anecdotal evidence in the myths of Noah, Gligamesh and Atlantis to lend weight to the idea there was some level of civilization in and around the Mediterranean before the end of the last ice age. The trauma of the floods that occurred with the melting of the ice and the rising of the seas is reflected in these myths, and any existing coastal cities would have been destroyed. There's speculation about the true age of the Sphinx, and that its base features water erosion damage. The last time there was any water around the Sphinx would have been around 10,000 years ago, at the end of the ice age. I'm not up to date on that research though. Fun to speculate.

Yeah, I'm kind of obsessed with this. Enough of an adult that it doesn't affect my self-worth if an advanced antediluvian civilization existed or not, but I'll pretty much read anything not written by a crazy person on this topic (which is hard to come by, IMHO).
 

Dave.C.Robinson

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As a pulp writer I love the Silurian hypothesis, and of course it's part of my series' backstory. As a person who likes to consider himself scientifically literate I have to think it's tremendously unlikely though I can see some value in the idea of figuring out how to look for the evidence.

On the other hand, I'm a firm believer in the idea that there were probably some very sophisticated cultures in areas such as the Mediterranean basin or possibly Doggerland anywhere from 7,000 to 15,000 years ago that we simply don't know anything about. I wouldn't be surprised to find evidence of such cultures almost anywhere on the globe if we could just look in the right places. Such groups may or may not have had metallurgy, but organization and trade would have been extremely likely.
 

Helix

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As a pulp writer I love the Silurian hypothesis, and of course it's part of my series' backstory. As a person who likes to consider himself scientifically literate I have to think it's tremendously unlikely though I can see some value in the idea of figuring out how to look for the evidence.

On the other hand, I'm a firm believer in the idea that there were probably some very sophisticated cultures in areas such as the Mediterranean basin or possibly Doggerland anywhere from 7,000 to 15,000 years ago that we simply don't know anything about. I wouldn't be surprised to find evidence of such cultures almost anywhere on the globe if we could just look in the right places. Such groups may or may not have had metallurgy, but organization and trade would have been extremely likely.

Nawarla Gabarnmung rock art in the Top End of the Northern Territory dates back at least 28,000 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabarnmung
 

Kjbartolotta

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Nawarla Gabarnmung rock art in the Top End of the Northern Territory dates back at least 28,000 years.

Well your continent's just got everything! Next you're gonna tell me Farscape was filmed there too.
 

Helix

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Well your continent's just got everything! Next you're gonna tell me Farscape was filmed there too.

:Shrug:If you want to find material evidence older than a few thousand years, look in places that have not been scoured by ice or inundated. Worth listening to oral histories too.
 
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