[leepowers]

Another possibility is that chances of advanced civilizations developing are extraordinarily rare. It could be so rare that even if anatomically modern humans exist for one to two million years, the species only establishes advanced civilizations once or twice.

It could be the case the cyclical pattern is 1000k years of pre-history - then 1k years of advanced civilization - followed by 1000k years reversion to a pre-historical state. We could be the outliers in a cycle that is far more ancient and far more vast than Graham Hancock imagines.

And the criticisms of Hancock are well founded. He looks at a site like Gobekli Tepe. He ignores the most parsimonious explanation - that this is a temple site for observing obscure and long forgotten religious rituals. Instead Hancock engages in flights of fancy, asserting that GT is akin to a university, a place used to teach the long-forgotten secrets of a lost civilization. The criticism is not that he's positing a cyclical a view - but that he's making fantastical assertions without the evidence to back them up.

> ...its also entirely plausible those predecessors didn't discover or take advantage of fossil fuels making it very easy to not leave any traces of there existence

Or it could be the case we don't see any evidence because these ancient advanced civilizations didn't exist. We can infer non-existence from the lack of evidence. What we can't do is make an unfalsifiable claim without evidence and assert that ancient advanced civilizations existed. It's entertaining to speculate, or to listen to GH read the tea leaves. But it doesn't prove anything.

We have evidence of populous and vibrant civilizations existing in Africa, the Americas, the Mediterranean, and many other places in the past 20,000 years. We have essentially zero evidence for advanced civilizations during the period before the Neolithic, the long era of pre-history of our species.

[edwnj]

I agree Hancock's theories often has a lot of wishful thinking but they seem more plausible to me than the current orthodoxy which imo is definitely wrong.

> Another possibility is that chances of advanced civilizations developing are extraordinarily rare.

My issue with this theory is it makes us special (chronological snobbery). It makes a lot more sense for us to be standing on the ruins of many great civilizations that were roughly around ballpark or even more advanced than us. This would be more in line with our understanding of nature which is very conservative and cyclical.

> We have evidence of populous and vibrant civilizations existing

My understanding of this is, nature is a very powerful destruction agent and most archeological finds are rare exceptional cases where multiple unlikely things happened to get the area preserved.