I think that there probably were civilizations before the ones we can date historically and archeologically, given the puzzling odd bits of knowledge etc that seem out of place.

My mother, who is an archeologist put a very pertinant question to me. Where's all the garbage? A great deal of information about the past come from analysis of the garbage people left behind. Our civilization is generating so much garbage we don't know where to put it! Where is the Atlantean garbage?

I wonder if we are looking in the right places. Many large cities today are on rivers at the lowest bridging point at the time of their founding. If a civilization was around during an ice age when the sea level was lower, their cities would now be underwater.

What do other people think?

Weres the garbage you ask? Goin I say why? simply because theres a big difference between our garbage and there garbage and more its a two flod difference .
One Lots of our garbage will be here for a long time becuase of the typ it is .Plastics radation lots and I do mean lots of metals.
Now go back three thousand years what type of garbage do you sopose they had then ? Table scraps?no because food was much harder to come by . Paper No only the very rich could afford papirias ( made from reds .
Rock lots of rocks it what they had heck the only metals they had were brass and copper and iron .
and again only the wealthy had acces to it . And finly we today have a world poplation bordering on 6 billion the world poplation any time more the three hundred years agaio was around 500 million.went up a little then big plage hits bringing it back down the poplation stady at this leavel from around when we Humans first started making villiags to the 1800reds.
We do find plenty of clay pots and briks a few swards but not as manny .
All you find is this stuff.Unless you get lucky enough to find the Kings burial chamber. then you find the good stuff.

the above is the most confusing and non-sensical grouping together of words i have ever seen. wow. but he has the jist of it, garbage back then was more biodegratible than it is now, because most of it was not man made. plastics make it possible.

From what I have read, Atlantis was 10K years+ ago, most stuff would decompose and go back to the earth. The other point is not everyone agree's where Atlantis is/was, so how could we look at their garbage if we don't know exactly where they were.

Quite correct, Biggles -- garbage is one of the cues that archaeologists use to determine where civilizations are/were and what they were like. Modern civilizations leave a lot of high-tech stuff aorund and most of it is very durable.

We do have artifacts from 10K years ago (and earlier); items of bone and stone. One of the petroglyph sites I'll film next week is unique in that it does have a nearby garbage pit, indicating that the site was close to a place where Native Americans had an established village. No other trace of that village remains, however (not that we've seen.)

There's also a remarkable lack of "tourist artifacts" from a Mysterious Unknown Civilization around the world. If everyone on our planet was to vanish suddenly, in 10,000 years we could still see (from the garbage and artifacts) the places that American or British tourists had visited.

the population nowadays is much larger then it has ever been.

depending on the timeline of atlantis/lemuria things might have decompose as dunkleskates said

if we can't find bulidings qwe're not gonna find garbage

if aliens were part of this maybe their were alien garbage men

ro maybe it never existed and it is just nice to think of the legend

As someone has already stated, their garbage is different from ours. I believe that most of their garbage was biodegradeable, unlike our plastics and such. At most, their broken pottery is still evident today.

I think CardinalBiggles' point was that if there was an advanced earlier civ, then presumably they would have had advanced (nondegradable) materials like us... so where are they? Perhaps they were even more advanced: effective recycling, vaporizing whatever else, much less waste to begin with... or we just haven't found it yet, perhaps because its at the bottom of the Black Sea.

This probably won't be much help, but there is evidence somewhere (I forget where) that the Native Americans had so called "garbage dumps" like we do now. Of course, their trash was a little more biodegradable than our present day garbage. But there was a site found (and I’m sorry but I can’t even remember the location). I can’t even tell y’all how old it is estimated to be. Sorry for the lack of information, but at least someone found evidence somewhere…