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If there were an industrial civilization here before us (modern humans) then it would be astonishing that in all of the fossils we have discovered, we've never

If there were an industrial civilization here before us (modern humans) then it would be astonishing that in all of the fossils we have discovered, we've never yet discovered a single ancient nut, bolt, screwdriver, wrench, etc. Not one single wire or cast metal part. As per the article, that civilization would have to predate all of the vast history of evolution that we know of. Wouldn't some higher life forms from such an earlier civilization have been in the fossil record?

SubiculumCode 3y ago
The article indicated that surface turnover could have removed that evidence.
- Mountain_Skies 3y ago
  If that were the case, perhaps someday we will find evidence on the Moon or elsewhere in the Solar System that an earlier civilization achieved space flight before they were erased from Earth and unable to establish a permanent foothold elsewhere in our corner of the cosmos. The Moon and other celestial bodies in the Solar System of course have their own processes that erase the surface over time, but at least with the Moon, it does appear to be a far slower process.
- topspin 3y ago
  And yet we have 3.4 billion year old cyanobacteria fossils.
  - newZWhoDis 3y ago
    Various sci-fi has explored this idea, for example Mass Effect, but “Reaper” species could explain that.
    - topspin 3y ago
      Also aliens. I see.
  - zen928 3y ago
    yep. these kind of thought experiments are cute but it's so easy to just immediately dismiss bad science that wants to ignore historical record to write paragraphs of fanfiction the main crux of these arguments always depends on how it's hard to prove something didn't happen without exact historical evidence for every single organism in every single recorded geologic period, which is a terminating thought to actually holding a rational conversation. OK, cool, then we also: live in a simulation, are observed by aliens or influenced by aliens, move to alternate realities every time we sleep, etc. wow, so "interesting"!!
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jboogey 3y ago
A great Atlantic article explaining how current human civilzation might appear in a fossil record in the distant future https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/08/arrogance-anthropocene/595795/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/08/arroganc...
- deleted 3y ago
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tarikjn 3y ago
Not pre-human but challenging the understood modern human timeline of industrialisation — We have not found the tools, but we may have found the products; in the form of stone-based vases that archeologists attribute to the Early Egyptian Period but are believed to be from much earlier, and would have required tools that have not been discovered yet. The channel UnchartedX make a compelling argument about this hypothesis: https://youtu.be/ixTTvRGk0HQ https://youtu.be/ixTTvRGk0HQ
- lumost 3y ago
  Pre-history is tough. Outside of written accounts and a few major cities cited in particular environments - there isn’t a lot of evidence about what humans were doing for 100k years before the Roman/Chinese empires formed. Even Egyptian history is pretty spotty. We know there were civilizations in North America such as the Mississippi River valley mound builders - but our knowledge tops out at “they existed”. It would not surprise me if agrarian civilization rose and fell multiple times due to climate change.
  - _aleph2c_ 3y ago
    Maybe we should look off planet, look to the Lagrange points: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrange_point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrange_point We might find some old equipment from an elder spacefaring species. If we don't find anything, maybe we should leave some human monuments out there so the next civilization can know about us.
    - roseway4 3y ago
      As the Wikipedia article mentions, we’ve already done just this with the JWST…
      - NavinF 3y ago
        Naw the JWST won't stay there after it loses power. > The points L1, L2, and L3 are positions of unstable equilibrium. Any object orbiting at L1, L2, or L3 will tend to fall out of orbit; it is therefore rare to find natural objects there, and spacecraft inhabiting these areas must employ a small but critical amount of station keeping in order to maintain their position.
barelysapient 3y ago
I like to wonder what undiscovered fossils exist below the oceans that cover 70 percent of our planet.
- blueflow 3y ago
  Look up about continental vs ocean crust, ocean crust is younger and has a shorter lifetime. You have better chances finding maritime fossils on land.
  - jamiek88 3y ago
    Yeah subduction is the missing key that took a while for us to understand. Ocean crust is young. In fact most earthly rock is relatively young. Plate tectonics was such a clever idea. So obvious now, I mean just look at a map of the world of course continents were once one, you can see where they join, like a jigsaw puzzle. It astonished early western explorers finding seashells on mountains!
    - DavHeheCuddly 3y ago
      or maybe all the continents were once one because it was just the full surface of an expanding planet
BuyMyBitcoins 3y ago
I figure that any industrialized civilization would have left indirect evidence of itself by mucking up the fossil record with introduced species. We intentionally and unintentionally introduce plants and animals far outside their natural range. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbian_exchange https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbian_exchange You would see some species inexplicably take on a worldwide distribution, or see species suddenly turn up on far away landmasses with no good explanation. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chorioactis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chorioactis The link above is fascinating, but I do not think it is evidence of any past civilization. This probably happened naturally, but it does seem exceedingly rare. If there were a past industrial civilization there would probably be tens of thousands of examples like this one.
- naasking 3y ago
  How many introduced species are there as a percentage of all existing species? This seems like an important number to calculate the probability that we might have missed such an introduced species given the fossil record we have. It could also be that introduced species are less likely to be found in the fossil record for whatever reason. Then again, maybe we have found such a thing but haven't recognized it for what it is due to missing context.
  - BuyMyBitcoins 3y ago
    That’s a good point, and I don’t have an answer. In my mind I was thinking of more obvious examples, like camels being introduced to Australia. Or cichlids from Lake Victoria being introduced into isolated lakes in North America. The idea being that you would notice some very obvious out-of-place fossils. I also assume that these species, often invasive, would outlast the civilizations that introduced them. So you could probably also infer some of this by looking at descendant populations.
    - naasking 3y ago
      We would naturally just assume that the same species appearing in different places just implied that those places were closer together in the past + migration. And so we have Pangaea before continental drift. If we lacked progenitors of those species in some places, we would just call it a temporary gap in the fossil record, of which we have many. We're pretty good at inventing explanations. Eventually these gaps might start looking conspicuous, but I'm not sure if we're at that point yet.
getmeinrn 3y ago
Random thought, but if we extrapolate the path we're on in terms of biodegradability and sustainability, it's not ridiculous to assume that a very advanced version of us would have developed the technology and legislation to ensure that all products biodegrade safely within X years.
- blueflow 3y ago
  This doesn't undo all the stuff that already is in the ground and rivers everywhere.
  - FredPret 3y ago
    After a long time hanging around, some organism might evolve that eats it though
    - blueflow 3y ago
      Which happened for all fossils already and they are still there.
      - FredPret 3y ago
        Fair point, although not all of them, and not all of those that do remain. If styrofoam ever starts rotting, maybe the styro-philes will eat 100% of each cup and poop out only completely normal organic matter. Nobody will ever find it!
        hutzlibu 3y ago
        Can we develope such a microorganism please?
        InvaderFizz 3y ago
        Worms were discovered that eat styrofoam. There was a lot about it going on the news last summer[0]. 0: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/superworms-eat-and-survive-on-polystyrene/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/superworms-eat-an...
JackFr 3y ago
One hundred million years is a long time for a screwdriver.
hooande 3y ago
This assumes that their technology would be similar to ours. They could have used biological mechanical parts, made from plant or animal material. They could have had radically different theories of mechanics or construction that better fit the state of the planet at their time. In general the statement "They couldn't have been civilized because they aren't exactly like us" limits what we look for and how we look for it.
- notahacker 3y ago
  The statement "they couldn't have been civilized because they aren't exactly like us" is a straw man though The actual question the article posits is "Could an Industrial Civilization Have Predated Humankind?", and so it seems logical to take evidence of industry as a starting point to answer that question. A mere couple of hundred years of human industry has moved vast quantities of matter about, created many new types of molecule, demonstrably altered the climate and filled sediment beds with objects far more eyecatching and likely to be preserved than the dinosaur feathers and skin prints and footprints we've found fossils of. An industrial civilization need not regard combustion engines as the most useful power source, prefer wheels to gliders or think straight lines look cool, but it does need to be characterised by some sort of industry. A hypothetical species of dinosaur that spent its life writing beautiful poetry, studiously avoiding dropping its organic tools anywhere they might be fossilised and generally being content enough with its life to not try to remake the planet for its convenience might even be more intelligent and cultured than us, but it wouldn't be an industrial civilization.
  - kragen 3y ago
    a human brain contains 100 trillion synapses each transmitting a signal of about 100 bits per second, and weighs 1.3 kg, for something like 10¹⁶ bit operations per second, 8 × 10¹² bit operations per second per gram. the cpu i'm typing this on weighs about a gram and has four cores, each of which typically manages about 1.5 64-bit operations 2.6 billion times a second, about 10¹² bit operations per second and also about 10¹² bit operations per second per gram. evidently the brain tissue is about an order of magnitude more computationally powerful per unit weight, and as it happens it also uses an additional three or four orders of magnitude less energy per unit weight. manufacturing it is also much cheaper. if we knew how to program it, we'd probably program globs of neurons rather than the very fine photolithographic microelectronics we are using today neurons, however, fossilize very poorly indeed; after death they typically liquefy within days, losing all of the structure that could betray how they functioned the particular shape of our industrial civilization is based on mass production in centralized facilities of durable goods that are identical to high precision (deep submicron precision in the case of this cpu). clearly this is not the only possible way to produce massive abundance; the rain forest or even the corn field does not work this way, but produces much more detail than tsmc does much of the durability and fossilizability of our conventional technology stems from its stupidity. to remain standing, a two-story house would once be made with meter-thick walls, while modern hollow brick with plaster and reinforced concrete reduces this to perhaps ten solid centimeters between indoors and outdoors. more frugal balloon-frame designs consist entirely of metastable materials like wood and steel, materials which will lose their structure if left exposed to air and water, either suddenly in a fire or gradually over decades. but even a balloon-frame house is wasteful and inefficient compared to a five-meter-tall stand of bamboo remaking the planet for your convenience is much cheaper if you can avoid spending resources on durability and fossilizability which don't benefit you during your lifetime could you get there without a transitional phase of making lots of thick, solid objects out of materials that are stable on geological timescales? probably, but maybe not if your uplift path starts with fire instead of math...
marginalia_nu 3y ago
To be fair, there are entire human civilizations we know have existed that we barely have archeological evidence to make sense of. We know they had language, culture, technology and we've found shells, bones and rubble. That, and the fact that we've found one antiktythera mechanism and nothing like it before or since raises questions. It seems implausible for a culture to produce a singular advanced mechanical computer with no precursors and then stop and never make anything like it again.
- tyg13 3y ago
  To the contrary: the fact that only one ever was found, to me, suggests that it was the work of one brilliant mind whose work was not understood or continued by their culture.
  - marginalia_nu 3y ago
    Even if it is a single creator, does it seem realistic that this was the first and only machine they built?
    - throw47474777j 3y ago
      I’ve heard it argued by historians that there were likely to have been multiple prototypes of the antykythera mechanism, but each one was recycled to produce the next.
      - fuzzfactor 3y ago
        >each one was recycled to produce the next. This could lend itself to the idea that one person made it, and if nothing whatsoever like it had ever come before you have to figure it took an awfully long time for one person to create something this complicated single-handedly. Could be a number of years between iterations in a continuous improvement process that adds up to something like a life's work. Maybe also could be passed down to a subsequent individual like a very specialized craft, and build technology across generations.
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analog31 3y ago
Any such civilization would have to have been configured to leave no traces for us to discover. Russell's Teapot comes to mind.
- thrashh 3y ago
  That species would have to be completely united and able to collude without a single disagreement. Not only that, they would have had to achieve complete perfection because we haven’t found a single trace.
mc32 3y ago
It's one of those "prove a negative" but with the enthusiasm of flat-earthers. Is it technically possible there could have been an isolated population that evolved and emerged and then got engulfed by a supervolcano or was taken under by a sudden asteroid impact or ... and all traces erased? We can think and work out such scenarios, but they are not likely at all.
MR4D 3y ago
If it were more than 65 million years ago there would be no evidence due to plate tectonics destroying all evidence. Still could be on the moon or another planet though.
- paulryanrogers 3y ago
  We still have fossilized bones that old and older. And even if they had corroding tools there would likely be cast fossils proving their existence.
- flangola7 3y ago
  We have fossils of cyanobacteria from 3 billion years ago. There's plenty of dinosaur fossils that are 100+ million years old. We definitely could have found something.
- Barrin92 3y ago
  There would be no evidence on the surface of the earth, but just as there's characteristic fossil layers in the ground there would be evidence in the sediment. Right now about 30 billion tons of concrete are used by our species every year. If there were industrial civilizations of that scale, you'd have a whole stratum of very obvious artificial origin between the rocks. Also some leftovers of the nuclear industry. Enriched Uranium does not occur in nature but U235 has a half-life of about 700 million years. So remnants of our nuclear activity will be detectable for a long time.
markus_zhang 3y ago
The only possibility is...they sank into deep ocean. But then it's going to very unlikely that nothing surfaced for the last 20k or so years. So you have to throw a valcano or a large meteor on top of them, which would require even more proofs.
- mrangle 3y ago
  There are megaliths under water, off of the coast of Israel. Not natural rock formations that look like such, but confirmed and clear megaliths of the rock circle type that is all over Europe as well as in Israel and elsewhere in the Near East.
mrangle 3y ago
Where are the tools that carved the high relief sculptures at Gobekli Tepe, around 12,000 years ago? Where are the high relief carvings that predate Gobekli Tepe, which served as the skill development toward it? For example. And we don't need to go nearly that far back to notice lack of ancient metal that had to exist, given what it accomplished. Metal disintegrates fast. Megalithic evidence, at minimum and across history, implies a woefully incomplete archaeological record.
- EdwardDiego 3y ago
  Serious question, do we know that metal tools were used for those carvings? From what I recall, until iron/steel was invented, it was pretty much abrasion as bronze was not hard enough to chisel nearly every stone.
  - siriaan 3y ago
    The bedrock around Göbekli Tepe is apparently limestone, so saith Wikipedia, so no, metal is not required to carve it.
    - dr_dshiv 3y ago
      Stonehenge is much harder stone—and carved from “hammerstones.” Crazy the effort it took.
  - mrangle 3y ago
    Abrasion carved both the high relief sculptures and cut the megaliths from which they arise? Perhaps, I suppose. I don't know enough about the physics and control of the abrasive techniques referenced. Though, I'm always in favor of emphasizing plausible variables that weaken a hypothesis. What are the chances that abrasion work like that, hypothetically, was so specialized and unknown in 10,000 BC that Gobekli Tepe's high relief sculptures are the sole examples of that period and the earliest examples of such large and truly technical work? Nevermind the artistic skill that is reflected. Cro Magnon was carving anthropomorphic stone statuettes in the region of modern Germany in 40,000 BC. Food for thought: the Tell archaeological sites that dot the Fertile Crescent, which includes the Haran area (Gobekli Tepe), contain the most concentrated evidence of human technological firsts that seems to exist. Including evidence of earliest metalsmithing tech, if I remember correctly. See Yarim Tepe for a jumping off point. So the situation is: a. Stone carving predated Gobekli Tepe by at least 30,000 years b. The earliest known stone carvings were not in the region of Gobekli Tepe. Implying that stone carving culture and tech was known far outside of Mesopotamia, from an extremely early period. c. Gobekli Tepe's specific accomplishments are the first evidence that we have of such advanced sculpture and megalith construction skill. d. Metalsmithing arose in the immediate regions and cultures that included the area of Gobekli Tepe. So on one hand we have widespread tech suggested to be responsible for the first evidence of highly technical stonework that is limited to one area in this early period of pre-history, and on the other we have specific advanced tech (metallurgy) that is best for such technical and large scale work arising out of that same area. It could be a coincidence, but arguably it would be a large one.
zakki 3y ago
OOT but same vibes, this same reasoning is used by Creationist as well. If evolution happened, why don't we find more and more fossils of the intermediate form? Until now we only found final result of the evolution. And some hundred million years animals still exist, i.e. Coelacanth.
- IAmGraydon 3y ago
  Not sure what you're talking about here. There have been many thousands of fossils found at various stages of evolution. Human evolution alone has a wealth of examples, and this is not new: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_human_evolution_fossils https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_human_evolution_fossil...
coredog64 3y ago
There’s a Sci-Fi series that explores a technologically advanced ice age civilization that built with water/ice and hydraulics. The current protagonists couldn’t figure anything out because all that was left was tiny bits of corroded metal.
safety1st 3y ago
I think the argument goes that if the civilization was sufficiently old and short-lived, no we probably wouldn't find any fossilized evidence. For example we've only found about one dinosaur fossil per 10,000 years of dinosaur history. The dinosaurs were around for a long time, from 65-250 million years ago. Humans have only been industrialized for around 200 years. If you imagine a dinosaur civilization that's industralized for 1,000 years before it kills itself off, they still hung on 5 times longer than we have so far and yet we probably wouldn't have found fossils of their wrenches. (Not to mention that our archaeology is concentrated on places where humans lived which have little correlation to whatever might have been a good site for a dino city 100 million years ago.) The authors of the Silurian hypothesis paper believe it's unlikely that there was an ancient non-human industrialized civilization. But they think if there was we wouldn't find its fossils. We might need to look for other markers like climate variances, radioactive materials or artifacts on the moon. Maybe some civilization arose, got stuck in the bronze age or early industrial tech for a thousand years, didn't generate those signatures, then died out. If our fossil record isn't thorough enough to find them then that possibility seems hard to disprove. Wikipedia has a bit more detail on the Silurian hypothesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silurian_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silurian_hypothesis And the actual paper is here: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-journal-of-astrobiology/article/silurian-hypothesis-would-it-be-possible-to-detect-an-industrial-civilization-in-the-geological-record/77818514AA6907750B8F4339F7C70EC6# https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-journa...
- benj111 3y ago
  But we don't have any evidence for anything approaching civilisation, fair enough humans have been industrialised for 200 years, but they've been building to that point for 10s of 1000s of years.
  - safety1st 3y ago
    If there was a stone age dinosaur civilization that lasted for 10,000 years, what evidence of it would survive? We only even have one fossil of a dinosaur per 10,000 years of dinosaur history. They key idea is how sparse our fossil record is compared to the vastness of life's history. Plus we are talking about 100,000,000 years ago - the chance a flint or metal tool, or a stone building would survive that long and be found by us is zero or close to it.
Simon_O_Rourke 3y ago
Lets not forget all their detritus and trash too - as well as any industrial waste... that stuff would have shown up long long ago if it in fact existed.
ElFitz 3y ago
I recall someone asking on World Building StackExchange what aliens could find in a few tens of millions of years or so if the human race were to disappear today [0]. The answer was "not much", aside from discrepancies in metals distribution, with intriguing concentrations of iron oxyde, nuclear waste, or gold. I am aware it certainly isn’t the most scientific or authoritative of sources, but they made interesting points. [0]: https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/117267/humans-are-gone-what-can-i-harvest-from-their-cities-30m-years-later https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/117267/hum...
- defrost 3y ago
  As of last Tuesday, the mark of human indistrial and technology activity on Earth is officially marked in the geological layer: Welcome to the Anthropocene, Earth's new chapter (phys.org) https://phys.org/news/2023-07-anthropocene-earth-chapter.html https://phys.org/news/2023-07-anthropocene-earth-chapter.htm... Since 2009, a cloistered band of hard-rock geologists and other scientists have toiled on a mission of great consequence. On Tuesday they will deliver the last of their findings—the location of ground-zero for the Anthropocene, the proposed geological epoch borne of humanity's outsized impact on the planet. How the weight of the world fell on one geologist's shoulders https://phys.org/news/2023-07-weight-world-fell-geologist-shoulders.html https://phys.org/news/2023-07-weight-world-fell-geologist-sh... Zalasiewicz pointed to an "embarrassment of riches" of evidence locked in ice cores, sediment and coral skeletons: microplastics, forever chemicals, traces of invasive species, greenhouse gases, and the fallout from nuclear bombs. Proof humans reshaped the world? Chickens https://phys.org/news/2023-07-proof-humans-reshaped-world-chickens.html https://phys.org/news/2023-07-proof-humans-reshaped-world-ch... When aliens or our distant progeny sift through layers of sediment 500,000 years from now to decode the Earth's past, they will find unusual evidence of the abrupt change that upended life half-a-million years earlier: chicken bones. reply
  - krior 3y ago
    The announcement described in the first link (unfortunately in german): https://web.archive.org/web/20230714101242/https://www.mpg.de/20614478/anthropozaen-crawford-lake https://web.archive.org/web/20230714101242/https://www.mpg.d...
ekianjo 3y ago
What do you know about the preservation of metal in fossil layers over millions of years?
pragmatic 3y ago
Read the article.
RecycledEle 3y ago
I would not say there has never been a single ancient thing discovered. There are many anomalous findings in archeology. Here are a few examples: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Hammer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Hammer * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coso_artifact https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coso_artifact * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazca_Lines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazca_Lines * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yonaguni_Monument https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yonaguni_Monument * Parts of the Egyptian Pyramids seem to have been cut with circular saws. * Places in the ancient world seem to have been nuked, including the ancient city of Sodom. * Some ancient maps are amazingly accurate, when they should not have know the shapes of land masses. I'm NOT saying any of this proves the Silurian Hypothesis. I looked into some of these claims, and realized how hard it is to be an archaeologist. The amount of stuff left behind is small, and you can never be sure who did what to it over the centuries. Artifacts are not stored in hermetically sealed containers until archaeologists dig them up. Instead, artifacts mix with their environments for centuries. This mixes up the carbon and makes carbon dating iffy at best. I classify archaeology as a pseudo-science.
- tanuki 3y ago
  Aren't there lots of testible hypotheses in archaeology though? I get that you're saying that a lot of explanations feel speculative, but it feels a bit far to say the field itself is incompatible with the scientific method.
  - RecycledEle 3y ago
    The Scientific Method is: "Scientists (and other people) can then secure, or discard, their hypotheses by conducting suitable experiments." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method If my hypothesis is that pottery will look like this after being buried for 2,000 years, how do I test that? I don't have 2,000 years before I need to publish.

SubiculumCode 3y ago

The article indicated that surface turnover could have removed that evidence.

Mountain_Skies 3y ago
If that were the case, perhaps someday we will find evidence on the Moon or elsewhere in the Solar System that an earlier civilization achieved space flight before they were erased from Earth and unable to establish a permanent foothold elsewhere in our corner of the cosmos. The Moon and other celestial bodies in the Solar System of course have their own processes that erase the surface over time, but at least with the Moon, it does appear to be a far slower process.
topspin 3y ago
And yet we have 3.4 billion year old cyanobacteria fossils.
- newZWhoDis 3y ago
  Various sci-fi has explored this idea, for example Mass Effect, but “Reaper” species could explain that.
  - topspin 3y ago
    Also aliens. I see.
- zen928 3y ago
  yep. these kind of thought experiments are cute but it's so easy to just immediately dismiss bad science that wants to ignore historical record to write paragraphs of fanfiction the main crux of these arguments always depends on how it's hard to prove something didn't happen without exact historical evidence for every single organism in every single recorded geologic period, which is a terminating thought to actually holding a rational conversation. OK, cool, then we also: live in a simulation, are observed by aliens or influenced by aliens, move to alternate realities every time we sleep, etc. wow, so "interesting"!!

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jboogey 3y ago

A great Atlantic article explaining how current human civilzation might appear in a fossil record in the distant future https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/08/arrogance-anthropocene/595795/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/08/arroganc...

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tarikjn 3y ago

Not pre-human but challenging the understood modern human timeline of industrialisation — We have not found the tools, but we may have found the products; in the form of stone-based vases that archeologists attribute to the Early Egyptian Period but are believed to be from much earlier, and would have required tools that have not been discovered yet. The channel UnchartedX make a compelling argument about this hypothesis: https://youtu.be/ixTTvRGk0HQ https://youtu.be/ixTTvRGk0HQ

lumost 3y ago
Pre-history is tough. Outside of written accounts and a few major cities cited in particular environments - there isn’t a lot of evidence about what humans were doing for 100k years before the Roman/Chinese empires formed. Even Egyptian history is pretty spotty. We know there were civilizations in North America such as the Mississippi River valley mound builders - but our knowledge tops out at “they existed”. It would not surprise me if agrarian civilization rose and fell multiple times due to climate change.
- _aleph2c_ 3y ago
  Maybe we should look off planet, look to the Lagrange points: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrange_point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrange_point We might find some old equipment from an elder spacefaring species. If we don't find anything, maybe we should leave some human monuments out there so the next civilization can know about us.
  - roseway4 3y ago
    As the Wikipedia article mentions, we’ve already done just this with the JWST…
    - NavinF 3y ago
      Naw the JWST won't stay there after it loses power. > The points L1, L2, and L3 are positions of unstable equilibrium. Any object orbiting at L1, L2, or L3 will tend to fall out of orbit; it is therefore rare to find natural objects there, and spacecraft inhabiting these areas must employ a small but critical amount of station keeping in order to maintain their position.

barelysapient 3y ago

I like to wonder what undiscovered fossils exist below the oceans that cover 70 percent of our planet.

blueflow 3y ago
Look up about continental vs ocean crust, ocean crust is younger and has a shorter lifetime. You have better chances finding maritime fossils on land.
- jamiek88 3y ago
  Yeah subduction is the missing key that took a while for us to understand. Ocean crust is young. In fact most earthly rock is relatively young. Plate tectonics was such a clever idea. So obvious now, I mean just look at a map of the world of course continents were once one, you can see where they join, like a jigsaw puzzle. It astonished early western explorers finding seashells on mountains!
  - DavHeheCuddly 3y ago
    or maybe all the continents were once one because it was just the full surface of an expanding planet

BuyMyBitcoins 3y ago

I figure that any industrialized civilization would have left indirect evidence of itself by mucking up the fossil record with introduced species. We intentionally and unintentionally introduce plants and animals far outside their natural range. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbian_exchange https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbian_exchange You would see some species inexplicably take on a worldwide distribution, or see species suddenly turn up on far away landmasses with no good explanation. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chorioactis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chorioactis The link above is fascinating, but I do not think it is evidence of any past civilization. This probably happened naturally, but it does seem exceedingly rare. If there were a past industrial civilization there would probably be tens of thousands of examples like this one.

naasking 3y ago
How many introduced species are there as a percentage of all existing species? This seems like an important number to calculate the probability that we might have missed such an introduced species given the fossil record we have. It could also be that introduced species are less likely to be found in the fossil record for whatever reason. Then again, maybe we have found such a thing but haven't recognized it for what it is due to missing context.
- BuyMyBitcoins 3y ago
  That’s a good point, and I don’t have an answer. In my mind I was thinking of more obvious examples, like camels being introduced to Australia. Or cichlids from Lake Victoria being introduced into isolated lakes in North America. The idea being that you would notice some very obvious out-of-place fossils. I also assume that these species, often invasive, would outlast the civilizations that introduced them. So you could probably also infer some of this by looking at descendant populations.
  - naasking 3y ago
    We would naturally just assume that the same species appearing in different places just implied that those places were closer together in the past + migration. And so we have Pangaea before continental drift. If we lacked progenitors of those species in some places, we would just call it a temporary gap in the fossil record, of which we have many. We're pretty good at inventing explanations. Eventually these gaps might start looking conspicuous, but I'm not sure if we're at that point yet.

getmeinrn 3y ago

Random thought, but if we extrapolate the path we're on in terms of biodegradability and sustainability, it's not ridiculous to assume that a very advanced version of us would have developed the technology and legislation to ensure that all products biodegrade safely within X years.

blueflow 3y ago
This doesn't undo all the stuff that already is in the ground and rivers everywhere.
- FredPret 3y ago
  After a long time hanging around, some organism might evolve that eats it though
  - blueflow 3y ago
    Which happened for all fossils already and they are still there.
    - FredPret 3y ago
      Fair point, although not all of them, and not all of those that do remain. If styrofoam ever starts rotting, maybe the styro-philes will eat 100% of each cup and poop out only completely normal organic matter. Nobody will ever find it!
      - hutzlibu 3y ago
        Can we develope such a microorganism please?
        InvaderFizz 3y ago
        Worms were discovered that eat styrofoam. There was a lot about it going on the news last summer[0]. 0: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/superworms-eat-and-survive-on-polystyrene/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/superworms-eat-an...

JackFr 3y ago

One hundred million years is a long time for a screwdriver.

hooande 3y ago

This assumes that their technology would be similar to ours. They could have used biological mechanical parts, made from plant or animal material. They could have had radically different theories of mechanics or construction that better fit the state of the planet at their time. In general the statement "They couldn't have been civilized because they aren't exactly like us" limits what we look for and how we look for it.

notahacker 3y ago
The statement "they couldn't have been civilized because they aren't exactly like us" is a straw man though The actual question the article posits is "Could an Industrial Civilization Have Predated Humankind?", and so it seems logical to take evidence of industry as a starting point to answer that question. A mere couple of hundred years of human industry has moved vast quantities of matter about, created many new types of molecule, demonstrably altered the climate and filled sediment beds with objects far more eyecatching and likely to be preserved than the dinosaur feathers and skin prints and footprints we've found fossils of. An industrial civilization need not regard combustion engines as the most useful power source, prefer wheels to gliders or think straight lines look cool, but it does need to be characterised by some sort of industry. A hypothetical species of dinosaur that spent its life writing beautiful poetry, studiously avoiding dropping its organic tools anywhere they might be fossilised and generally being content enough with its life to not try to remake the planet for its convenience might even be more intelligent and cultured than us, but it wouldn't be an industrial civilization.
- kragen 3y ago
  a human brain contains 100 trillion synapses each transmitting a signal of about 100 bits per second, and weighs 1.3 kg, for something like 10¹⁶ bit operations per second, 8 × 10¹² bit operations per second per gram. the cpu i'm typing this on weighs about a gram and has four cores, each of which typically manages about 1.5 64-bit operations 2.6 billion times a second, about 10¹² bit operations per second and also about 10¹² bit operations per second per gram. evidently the brain tissue is about an order of magnitude more computationally powerful per unit weight, and as it happens it also uses an additional three or four orders of magnitude less energy per unit weight. manufacturing it is also much cheaper. if we knew how to program it, we'd probably program globs of neurons rather than the very fine photolithographic microelectronics we are using today neurons, however, fossilize very poorly indeed; after death they typically liquefy within days, losing all of the structure that could betray how they functioned the particular shape of our industrial civilization is based on mass production in centralized facilities of durable goods that are identical to high precision (deep submicron precision in the case of this cpu). clearly this is not the only possible way to produce massive abundance; the rain forest or even the corn field does not work this way, but produces much more detail than tsmc does much of the durability and fossilizability of our conventional technology stems from its stupidity. to remain standing, a two-story house would once be made with meter-thick walls, while modern hollow brick with plaster and reinforced concrete reduces this to perhaps ten solid centimeters between indoors and outdoors. more frugal balloon-frame designs consist entirely of metastable materials like wood and steel, materials which will lose their structure if left exposed to air and water, either suddenly in a fire or gradually over decades. but even a balloon-frame house is wasteful and inefficient compared to a five-meter-tall stand of bamboo remaking the planet for your convenience is much cheaper if you can avoid spending resources on durability and fossilizability which don't benefit you during your lifetime could you get there without a transitional phase of making lots of thick, solid objects out of materials that are stable on geological timescales? probably, but maybe not if your uplift path starts with fire instead of math...

marginalia_nu 3y ago

To be fair, there are entire human civilizations we know have existed that we barely have archeological evidence to make sense of. We know they had language, culture, technology and we've found shells, bones and rubble. That, and the fact that we've found one antiktythera mechanism and nothing like it before or since raises questions. It seems implausible for a culture to produce a singular advanced mechanical computer with no precursors and then stop and never make anything like it again.

tyg13 3y ago
To the contrary: the fact that only one ever was found, to me, suggests that it was the work of one brilliant mind whose work was not understood or continued by their culture.
- marginalia_nu 3y ago
  Even if it is a single creator, does it seem realistic that this was the first and only machine they built?
  - throw47474777j 3y ago
    I’ve heard it argued by historians that there were likely to have been multiple prototypes of the antykythera mechanism, but each one was recycled to produce the next.
    - fuzzfactor 3y ago
      >each one was recycled to produce the next. This could lend itself to the idea that one person made it, and if nothing whatsoever like it had ever come before you have to figure it took an awfully long time for one person to create something this complicated single-handedly. Could be a number of years between iterations in a continuous improvement process that adds up to something like a life's work. Maybe also could be passed down to a subsequent individual like a very specialized craft, and build technology across generations.
- deleted 3y ago

analog31 3y ago

Any such civilization would have to have been configured to leave no traces for us to discover. Russell's Teapot comes to mind.

thrashh 3y ago
That species would have to be completely united and able to collude without a single disagreement. Not only that, they would have had to achieve complete perfection because we haven’t found a single trace.

mc32 3y ago

It's one of those "prove a negative" but with the enthusiasm of flat-earthers. Is it technically possible there could have been an isolated population that evolved and emerged and then got engulfed by a supervolcano or was taken under by a sudden asteroid impact or ... and all traces erased? We can think and work out such scenarios, but they are not likely at all.

MR4D 3y ago

If it were more than 65 million years ago there would be no evidence due to plate tectonics destroying all evidence. Still could be on the moon or another planet though.

paulryanrogers 3y ago
We still have fossilized bones that old and older. And even if they had corroding tools there would likely be cast fossils proving their existence.
flangola7 3y ago
We have fossils of cyanobacteria from 3 billion years ago. There's plenty of dinosaur fossils that are 100+ million years old. We definitely could have found something.
Barrin92 3y ago
There would be no evidence on the surface of the earth, but just as there's characteristic fossil layers in the ground there would be evidence in the sediment. Right now about 30 billion tons of concrete are used by our species every year. If there were industrial civilizations of that scale, you'd have a whole stratum of very obvious artificial origin between the rocks. Also some leftovers of the nuclear industry. Enriched Uranium does not occur in nature but U235 has a half-life of about 700 million years. So remnants of our nuclear activity will be detectable for a long time.

markus_zhang 3y ago

The only possibility is...they sank into deep ocean. But then it's going to very unlikely that nothing surfaced for the last 20k or so years. So you have to throw a valcano or a large meteor on top of them, which would require even more proofs.

mrangle 3y ago
There are megaliths under water, off of the coast of Israel. Not natural rock formations that look like such, but confirmed and clear megaliths of the rock circle type that is all over Europe as well as in Israel and elsewhere in the Near East.

mrangle 3y ago

Where are the tools that carved the high relief sculptures at Gobekli Tepe, around 12,000 years ago? Where are the high relief carvings that predate Gobekli Tepe, which served as the skill development toward it? For example. And we don't need to go nearly that far back to notice lack of ancient metal that had to exist, given what it accomplished. Metal disintegrates fast. Megalithic evidence, at minimum and across history, implies a woefully incomplete archaeological record.

EdwardDiego 3y ago
Serious question, do we know that metal tools were used for those carvings? From what I recall, until iron/steel was invented, it was pretty much abrasion as bronze was not hard enough to chisel nearly every stone.
- siriaan 3y ago
  The bedrock around Göbekli Tepe is apparently limestone, so saith Wikipedia, so no, metal is not required to carve it.
  - dr_dshiv 3y ago
    Stonehenge is much harder stone—and carved from “hammerstones.” Crazy the effort it took.
- mrangle 3y ago
  Abrasion carved both the high relief sculptures and cut the megaliths from which they arise? Perhaps, I suppose. I don't know enough about the physics and control of the abrasive techniques referenced. Though, I'm always in favor of emphasizing plausible variables that weaken a hypothesis. What are the chances that abrasion work like that, hypothetically, was so specialized and unknown in 10,000 BC that Gobekli Tepe's high relief sculptures are the sole examples of that period and the earliest examples of such large and truly technical work? Nevermind the artistic skill that is reflected. Cro Magnon was carving anthropomorphic stone statuettes in the region of modern Germany in 40,000 BC. Food for thought: the Tell archaeological sites that dot the Fertile Crescent, which includes the Haran area (Gobekli Tepe), contain the most concentrated evidence of human technological firsts that seems to exist. Including evidence of earliest metalsmithing tech, if I remember correctly. See Yarim Tepe for a jumping off point. So the situation is: a. Stone carving predated Gobekli Tepe by at least 30,000 years b. The earliest known stone carvings were not in the region of Gobekli Tepe. Implying that stone carving culture and tech was known far outside of Mesopotamia, from an extremely early period. c. Gobekli Tepe's specific accomplishments are the first evidence that we have of such advanced sculpture and megalith construction skill. d. Metalsmithing arose in the immediate regions and cultures that included the area of Gobekli Tepe. So on one hand we have widespread tech suggested to be responsible for the first evidence of highly technical stonework that is limited to one area in this early period of pre-history, and on the other we have specific advanced tech (metallurgy) that is best for such technical and large scale work arising out of that same area. It could be a coincidence, but arguably it would be a large one.

zakki 3y ago

OOT but same vibes, this same reasoning is used by Creationist as well. If evolution happened, why don't we find more and more fossils of the intermediate form? Until now we only found final result of the evolution. And some hundred million years animals still exist, i.e. Coelacanth.

IAmGraydon 3y ago
Not sure what you're talking about here. There have been many thousands of fossils found at various stages of evolution. Human evolution alone has a wealth of examples, and this is not new: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_human_evolution_fossils https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_human_evolution_fossil...

coredog64 3y ago

There’s a Sci-Fi series that explores a technologically advanced ice age civilization that built with water/ice and hydraulics. The current protagonists couldn’t figure anything out because all that was left was tiny bits of corroded metal.

safety1st 3y ago

I think the argument goes that if the civilization was sufficiently old and short-lived, no we probably wouldn't find any fossilized evidence. For example we've only found about one dinosaur fossil per 10,000 years of dinosaur history. The dinosaurs were around for a long time, from 65-250 million years ago. Humans have only been industrialized for around 200 years. If you imagine a dinosaur civilization that's industralized for 1,000 years before it kills itself off, they still hung on 5 times longer than we have so far and yet we probably wouldn't have found fossils of their wrenches. (Not to mention that our archaeology is concentrated on places where humans lived which have little correlation to whatever might have been a good site for a dino city 100 million years ago.) The authors of the Silurian hypothesis paper believe it's unlikely that there was an ancient non-human industrialized civilization. But they think if there was we wouldn't find its fossils. We might need to look for other markers like climate variances, radioactive materials or artifacts on the moon. Maybe some civilization arose, got stuck in the bronze age or early industrial tech for a thousand years, didn't generate those signatures, then died out. If our fossil record isn't thorough enough to find them then that possibility seems hard to disprove. Wikipedia has a bit more detail on the Silurian hypothesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silurian_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silurian_hypothesis And the actual paper is here: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-journal-of-astrobiology/article/silurian-hypothesis-would-it-be-possible-to-detect-an-industrial-civilization-in-the-geological-record/77818514AA6907750B8F4339F7C70EC6# https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-journa...

benj111 3y ago
But we don't have any evidence for anything approaching civilisation, fair enough humans have been industrialised for 200 years, but they've been building to that point for 10s of 1000s of years.
- safety1st 3y ago
  If there was a stone age dinosaur civilization that lasted for 10,000 years, what evidence of it would survive? We only even have one fossil of a dinosaur per 10,000 years of dinosaur history. They key idea is how sparse our fossil record is compared to the vastness of life's history. Plus we are talking about 100,000,000 years ago - the chance a flint or metal tool, or a stone building would survive that long and be found by us is zero or close to it.

Simon_O_Rourke 3y ago

Lets not forget all their detritus and trash too - as well as any industrial waste... that stuff would have shown up long long ago if it in fact existed.

ElFitz 3y ago

I recall someone asking on World Building StackExchange what aliens could find in a few tens of millions of years or so if the human race were to disappear today [0]. The answer was "not much", aside from discrepancies in metals distribution, with intriguing concentrations of iron oxyde, nuclear waste, or gold. I am aware it certainly isn’t the most scientific or authoritative of sources, but they made interesting points. [0]: https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/117267/humans-are-gone-what-can-i-harvest-from-their-cities-30m-years-later https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/117267/hum...

defrost 3y ago
As of last Tuesday, the mark of human indistrial and technology activity on Earth is officially marked in the geological layer: Welcome to the Anthropocene, Earth's new chapter (phys.org) https://phys.org/news/2023-07-anthropocene-earth-chapter.html https://phys.org/news/2023-07-anthropocene-earth-chapter.htm... Since 2009, a cloistered band of hard-rock geologists and other scientists have toiled on a mission of great consequence. On Tuesday they will deliver the last of their findings—the location of ground-zero for the Anthropocene, the proposed geological epoch borne of humanity's outsized impact on the planet. How the weight of the world fell on one geologist's shoulders https://phys.org/news/2023-07-weight-world-fell-geologist-shoulders.html https://phys.org/news/2023-07-weight-world-fell-geologist-sh... Zalasiewicz pointed to an "embarrassment of riches" of evidence locked in ice cores, sediment and coral skeletons: microplastics, forever chemicals, traces of invasive species, greenhouse gases, and the fallout from nuclear bombs. Proof humans reshaped the world? Chickens https://phys.org/news/2023-07-proof-humans-reshaped-world-chickens.html https://phys.org/news/2023-07-proof-humans-reshaped-world-ch... When aliens or our distant progeny sift through layers of sediment 500,000 years from now to decode the Earth's past, they will find unusual evidence of the abrupt change that upended life half-a-million years earlier: chicken bones. reply
- krior 3y ago
  The announcement described in the first link (unfortunately in german): https://web.archive.org/web/20230714101242/https://www.mpg.de/20614478/anthropozaen-crawford-lake https://web.archive.org/web/20230714101242/https://www.mpg.d...

ekianjo 3y ago

What do you know about the preservation of metal in fossil layers over millions of years?

pragmatic 3y ago

Read the article.

RecycledEle 3y ago

I would not say there has never been a single ancient thing discovered. There are many anomalous findings in archeology. Here are a few examples: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Hammer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Hammer * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coso_artifact https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coso_artifact * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazca_Lines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazca_Lines * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yonaguni_Monument https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yonaguni_Monument * Parts of the Egyptian Pyramids seem to have been cut with circular saws. * Places in the ancient world seem to have been nuked, including the ancient city of Sodom. * Some ancient maps are amazingly accurate, when they should not have know the shapes of land masses. I'm NOT saying any of this proves the Silurian Hypothesis. I looked into some of these claims, and realized how hard it is to be an archaeologist. The amount of stuff left behind is small, and you can never be sure who did what to it over the centuries. Artifacts are not stored in hermetically sealed containers until archaeologists dig them up. Instead, artifacts mix with their environments for centuries. This mixes up the carbon and makes carbon dating iffy at best. I classify archaeology as a pseudo-science.

tanuki 3y ago
Aren't there lots of testible hypotheses in archaeology though? I get that you're saying that a lot of explanations feel speculative, but it feels a bit far to say the field itself is incompatible with the scientific method.
- RecycledEle 3y ago
  The Scientific Method is: "Scientists (and other people) can then secure, or discard, their hypotheses by conducting suitable experiments." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method If my hypothesis is that pottery will look like this after being buried for 2,000 years, how do I test that? I don't have 2,000 years before I need to publish.