Could Earth Have Once Harbored a Pre-Human Industrial Civilization?

originally posted by: bloodymarvelous


How would we know the difference between a stone site created 65 million years ago by reptilians, and a similar site created 1 or 2 million years ago by sapiens, or another proto human?

By the age of the geological levels below and above it (presuming it is buried)

www.britannica.com...

originally posted by: Hanslune

originally posted by: bloodymarvelous


How would we know the difference between a stone site created 65 million years ago by reptilians, and a similar site created 1 or 2 million years ago by sapiens, or another proto human?

By the age of the geological levels below and above it (presuming it is buried)

www.britannica.com...

If it's buried, then it would need to be very hard stone in order to keep enough of its shape to be discernible.

I could see that working for cut diamonds. Cut flint.... not so much...

originally posted by: bloodymarvelous

originally posted by: Harte

My point was there's no sign of such a culture, much less an advanced one. Like I said, you have to start somewhere, and advanced doesn't happen for a VERY long time.
There would be evidence in stone if anyone had been around to use stone.
If this ancient culture existed too long ago for us to be able to detect it, then the entire point is moot, isn't it.

How would we know the difference between a stone site created 65 million years ago by reptilians, and a similar site created 1 or 2 million years ago by sapiens, or another proto human?

There are means for dating such sites. If no other way than dating the matrix such tools would be found in.
Stone tools can be dated by style as well, when dating the matrix is not possible.
Of course, if such a site dating to the Silurian were to be found, we couldn't know what the tool user looked like without some sort of fossilized remains.

originally posted by: bloodymarvelousI think the best place to look, if we ever have the means to do serious paleantology there, would be Antarctica. Since Antarctica was frozen over throughout all likely sapiens history, we could be certain that anything we found there, especially if it were far inland, was not sapiens.

Wouldn't be necessary to go to that expense.
The places to look are places where the Silurian is exposed and reasonably inexpensive to investigate. That would be the best hope for finding anything.
Plants were just starting to invade dry land during the Silurian.
Later during the Carboniferous, coal was forming - but the Silurian is too early for that.

Harte

Antarctica froze over 34 million years ago. At least that's something. To reach dinosaurs we need at least 60 million years.

Odds are anything that remains is buried under quite a number of rock strata. Might find some heavily warped spearheads, that .... nobody is really quite ready to commit to calling a spear head. Except conspiracy theorists, of course, who will think it looks "unmistakably" like a spearhead.

originally posted by: bloodymarvelous
Antarctica froze over 34 million years ago. At least that's something. To reach dinosaurs we need at least 60 million years.

Odds are anything that remains is buried under quite a number of rock strata. Might find some heavily warped spearheads, that .... nobody is really quite ready to commit to calling a spear head. Except conspiracy theorists, of course, who will think it looks "unmistakably" like a spearhead.

The oldest stone tools we current can find are 3.3 million years old. They haven't warped.

ichef.bbci.co.uk...

www.bbc.com...

Another interesting question we can ask ourselves is : what would they use as their building material?

For sapiens it looks like flint took the forefront. And I guess there aren't a lot of other good options. Interestingly , in the wiki article on flint:

en.wikipedia.org...

Flint sometimes occurs in large flint fields in Jurassic or Cretaceous beds, for example, in Europe. Puzzling giant flint formations known as paramoudra and flint circles are found around Europe but especially in Norfolk, England on the beaches at Beeston Bump and West Runton.[6]

en.wikipedia.org...

Paramoudras, paramoudra flints, pot stones or potstones are flint nodules found mainly in parts of north-west Europe: Norfolk (United Kingdom), Ireland, Denmark, Spain and Germany. In Norfolk they are known as pot stones and can be found on the beach below Beeston Bump just outside Beeston Regis. In Ireland they are known as paramoudras. The term paramoudras was first used by Buckland in 1817 and is a corruption of a Gaelic name, probably padhramoudras "ugly Paddies" or peura muireach "sea pears".[1]

Pot stones are flint nodules with a hollow center and have the appearance of a doughnut (torus). They can be found in columns resembling a backbone.

These flints are trace fossils of the burrows of an organism otherwise unknown except for these relics sometimes referred to as Bathicnus paramoudrae.[2][3]

So, if I'm reading this right: there are mysterious donut shaped objects made of flint, left over from the Cretaceous and Jurassic eras?

Of course it might have simply formed that way. Can't rule it out.

Obsidian is better, if you can find it, is the best for making stone tools. I worked all kinds of stones and found those were the best. The only difficulty is that they were brittle and would break if it hit a bone, etc.

originally posted by: Harte

originally posted by: bloodymarvelous

originally posted by: Fowlerstoad
a reply to: tamusan

I would think the best evidence of an earlier industrial civilization on Earth, and maybe the only evidence that would 'survive' for the eons, would be cut diamonds.

Our civilization has studded the surface with hundreds of millions of the things, both industrial, and aesthetic in purpose.

If we could find cut diamonds in strata of the Earth from an earlier age, that would be good evidence of a prior industrial civilization.

I believe our cut diamonds will survive, for whatever future civilization that may look back eons from now, and wonder about the 'holocene hypothesis' haha, or whatever they might call our age in the future.

I wonder what kinds of explanations would be attempted, to try to explain it away?

originally posted by: Harte

originally posted by: bloodymarvelous

Clearly evidence of a short lived advanced civilization from millions of years ago would be unlikely to survive ON EARTH.

How can a civilization be short-lived and yet become advanced?
That is, you gotta start somewhere and there's all these rocks laying around...

Harte

On the scale of the age of Dinosaurs, 20,000 years would be "short lived" .

Even if they had, like we do, about 2 or 3 million years of history, but it mirrored ours, then most of the three million years you'd be seeing artifacts that you can barely call "tool using". Stuff like a sharpened rock that may, or may not, have been used to hit stuff with?

The really advanced tools would only run about 10,000 years, if that. Even if they reached the space age.

My point was there's no sign of such a culture, much less an advanced one. Like I said, you have to start somewhere, and advanced doesn't happen for a VERY long time.
There would be evidence in stone if anyone had been around to use stone.
If this ancient culture existed too long ago for us to be able to detect it, then the entire point is moot, isn't it.

The Silurian Hypothesis does not assert that there may have been an advanced civilization 300 million (or whatever) years ago. It's more about the question of, IF such a civilization existed, what means could we use to detect it?
It's really an exercise in detecting ancient extinct civilizations, with an eye toward extraterrestrial cultures (eventually.)

Harte

250 mil ya the earth split open and lava spewed out all over for 2 million yrs.

it was in russia.it messed up the planet. so anyone around at the time was screwed. i believe they said it was an ELE.

i think it happened more recently in ice or greenland. on a way smaller scale, of course.

i'm sure both are on YT somewhere with more details.

oh, its called the siberian traps.

originally posted by: Hanslune
Obsidian is better, if you can find it, is the best for making stone tools. I worked all kinds of stones and found those were the best. The only difficulty is that they were brittle and would break if it hit a bone, etc.

As a way to kill bigger dinosaurs, it would probably be effective. At least the unarmoured ones.

It's probably less effective at cutting wood, but there are cases from the Ice Age of sapiens using bones from Mammoth to build shelters, and tallow can keep a fire going. So dinosaur bones and fat could provide the rest of the building materials for our silurian erectus to thrive.

originally posted by: bloodymarvelous

It's probably less effective at cutting wood, but there are cases from the Ice Age of sapiens using bones from Mammoth to build shelters, and tallow can keep a fire going. So dinosaur bones and fat could provide the rest of the building materials for our silurian erectus to thrive.

Dinosaurs were never a problem forhumans but other humans, other megafauna and particularly pack scavengers and mammal predators were a real threat to early man, along with snakes, etc.

I've cut wood with them but a blunt heavy stone (chert or flint) axes worked better in my estimation. A good river gobble stone. Actually for small trees smashing them worked too. Big trees? girdle them and wait.

originally posted by: sarahvital

originally posted by: bloodymarvelous
Bipedal dinosaurs were incredibly common. I mean: considering that their last surviving descendants: birds, are also bipedal.

But most of the dinosaurs we see in the record had smaller fore limbs that were used for something other than flying. Usually with claws on them. It's not too big a stretch to imagine a short lived species emerging that has fingers and an opposable thumb on the end of those appendages. And then using tools.

www.nhm.ac.uk...



We have a hard time even finding early humans from a million years back. Nevermind trying to find remnants of a human-ish dinosaur from 55 million years ago. Just isn't going to happen.

The only reason we find dinosaur bones at all is because they existed for many millions of years before they died out, giving them many millions of opportunities to leave fossils for us. Probably the odds of any dinosaur's skeleton surviving to the present were similar to the odds of winning the Power Ball Jackpot, but many, many, many dinosaurs lived and died.

If the human-like dinos were industrial for just a couple thousand years............. that's just plain too small a time period for there to be enough lottery winners.

how about octopi?

they'd live in the oceans.

they could have had the smarts .

the dino killer would have screwed up the oceans too.

hey! it's word octopus day!


seems like they might be a convergent species with us.

might be even better.

www.msn.com... en-us/news/technology/this-similarity-between-human-and-octopus-brains-has-scientists-shocked/ar-AAZ0SHq?ocid=winpsearchbox&pc=DSBPC&cvid=3b8358fd5a5e 4d7086cc3137a46dbd30&nclid=9D17481B4CFBA67BF8B172DA00472B50&ts=1665207740432&nclidts=1665207740&tsms=432



they could have been industrial but not as we know it.

originally posted by: Hanslune

originally posted by: bloodymarvelous

It's probably less effective at cutting wood, but there are cases from the Ice Age of sapiens using bones from Mammoth to build shelters, and tallow can keep a fire going. So dinosaur bones and fat could provide the rest of the building materials for our silurian erectus to thrive.

Dinosaurs were never a problem forhumans but other humans, other megafauna and particularly pack scavengers and mammal predators were a real threat to early man, along with snakes, etc.

I've cut wood with them but a blunt heavy stone (chert or flint) axes worked better in my estimation. A good river gobble stone. Actually for small trees smashing them worked too. Big trees? girdle them and wait.

So an obsidian tool culture should be able to work.

And looking for known volcanos active in the Cretaceous period, apparently Alaska is a good place to look.

pubs.geoscienceworld.org...

pubs.er.usgs.gov...

The Cretaceous appears to have been a volcanically active time, since the Atlantic ocean was forming, although if you lived then I'm not sure you would necessarily see eruptions happening all the time or anything like that.

The only problem, though: dependency on Obsidian binds you geographically to regions that have it. Sapiens could travel the whole world and find flint everywhere they went. The tool using Saurions could have been stuck in one place, unable to spread out.

Obsidian was widely traded.

www.jstor.org...
www.si.edu...

www.historyshistories.com...

i0.wp.com...

i0.wp.com...

aratta.wordpress.com...

The tool using Saurions could have been stuck in one place, unable to spread out.

Trust me they never had that problem....

Once trade networks are in place, and you're not having to live off of local natural resources, a thing like sourcing from far away regions won't stop civilization's progress. But that level of civilization is only around 10,000 years old for sapiens.

They could have spread to the whole globe during the final 10,000 years their civilization grew in, but we're likely only going to find the odd spearhead or cutting knife, left behind during the "wandering forager" era that would have lasted a million years or more. If they were stuck in one place during that era, then we're only going to find their tools there.

But I guess it stands to reason that they wouldn't be too picky. Once they found obsidian was a good tool making material, they would probably try other stones. Unless the earliest tool builders were doing it out of a sort of "nesting instinct" where they didn't really understand the reasoning behind what they were doing.

a reply to: bloodymarvelous

I like the way you're thinking about this.

My old friend Hanslune (though dependable as ever as regards his facts and scholarship) is, I think, putting a little too much faith in the ability of archaeology and palaeontology to lay this question to rest. The past is far from an open book. And, as some ATSers love to say, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

The OP question is one serious scientists are asking, too.

Forget the Silurian Hypothesis or any other hypothesis that proposes the possible existence of a particular prehuman culture. That's looking at the question back to front.

The real question is: if a prehuman industrial civilization had existed on Earth, could we know it?

Hans says yes. You're saying maybe. Knowing what little I do about this, I would tend to agree with you.

Here's an article in Scientific American about some scientists' thoughts regarding that question.

An intelligent thread on ATS for once. Well, at least it shows flashes. Well done OP.

originally posted by: Astyanax
a reply to: bloodymarvelous

I like the way you're thinking about this.

My old friend Hanslune (though dependable as ever as regards his facts and scholarship) is, I think, putting a little too much faith in the ability of archaeology and palaeontology to lay this question to rest. The past is far from an open book. And, as some ATSers love to say, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

The OP question is one serious scientists are asking, too.

Forget the Silurian Hypothesis or any other hypothesis that proposes the possible existence of a particular prehuman culture. That's looking at the question back to front.

The real question is: if a prehuman industrial civilization had existed on Earth, could we know it?

Hans says yes. You're saying maybe. Knowing what little I do about this, I would tend to agree with you.

Here's an article in Scientific American about some scientists' thoughts regarding that question.

An intelligent thread on ATS for once. Well, at least it shows flashes. Well done OP.

Yes with the caveat that we could be wrong. However, for a world wide civilization with an equal or higher technology - yes we would have detected it. Now if in a small part of the world there was a non industrial civilization? We very well might not find that. Depends on lots of variables. I have been looking for a 'flowering' of human culture in the Eemian (en.wikipedia.org...), similar to what happened when the last ice age ended - nothing so far but the density of population would have been very low. perhaps 100,000-300,000 Homo (Denisovians, Neanderthals, HS and ?) with about 10-30,000 HS - yep that is tiny, tiny number. This is vanishing small and so far not a thing has been found except for signs of HG's.

Another issue to consider that populations might not have been all that large, even in their industrial faze.

Human population explosionism is the result of a sudden change in our method of subsistence that happened about 10,000 years ago, through no fault of our own, when the Younger Dryas event killed off the megafauna, and forced humanity to go from hunting the megafauna they had been hunting for over 80,000 years to hunting smaller game.

This was only sustainable by creating a favorable "young to old" ratio. Which required perpetual population growth, checked periodically by intertribal genocide.

Agriculture came along to help with it, but the labor requirements only exacerbated the young to old ratio problem. The faster reproducing groups won more genocidal wars.


That said.................. this was an amazing coincidence There no reason at all to think that it would be typical. When sapiens evolved, they originally evolved to be population stable, and if the Younger Dryas event had never happened, sapiens would still be population stable.

So, if intelligent species like sapiens is found on, say another planet, it is overwhelmingly likely that they would be population stable, not perpetually expansionist.

a reply to: tamusan

Yes .

www.youtube.com...

a reply to: Hanslune

However, for a world wide civilization with an equal or higher technology - yes we would have detected it.

Hans: yes, I understand that is your position. In my view you have not fully substantiated it with anything you have posted in this thread so far. You appear to be saying -- please correct me if I am wrong -- that evidence of a prehistoric industrial civilization would be ubiquitous, or at least so widespread that we could not help but find it.

I emphatically contest that assertion. You of all people should realise just how little we know about even the historical past, let alone prehistory. I am a historian who specialises in the colonial era in my country -- the last 500 years or so. My work -- for which I am paid, btw -- has shown me how hard it is to be really sure of any datum from the past, even one from such a recent period.

I should imagine it entirely likely that we would fail to discover even a Cretaceous-period civilization. As for earlier periods, I should think the survival of any artefacts at all is problematic.

People have been talking about cut diamonds in this thread. Two questions: first, aside from dating the stratum in which the diamond is found (unreliable as to its true provenance, frankly), how would you date one? I know my physics, so please don't patronise me with a lecture on isotope decay; the geological age of the stone is in fact no no help at all.

Second, why assume that our hypothetical civilization valued diamonds as we do? Perhaps their only use for diamonds was industrial. That would make an enormous difference to their frequency and distribution in strata; it would reduce by orders of magnitude the likelihood of our finding any.

I urge you to read the article I linked to and engage with the various arguments it raises. I like the idea, for instance, of a worldwide microplastics layer in benthic sediments, and I should like to hear your opinion about it.

One thing we can say is that humans were the only ones to go to the moon....

We really need to start sometime after 400million years ago, as before that there wasn't much going on in terms of massive evolution expansion, and 600 million was like snowball earth. We also need two things to make this happen past some raw level of intelligence. We need massive amount of the energy intake pumped into the brain and most likely Opposable Thumbs to build. I think we also would need a rather massive population. We humans take our almost 8 billion for granted, and outside of us humans and the animals we eat we see populations much lower by up to 100x lower for larger species, and that does not help in establishing advance civilizations.

Also, where did they go, if they didn't kill themselves off?