I love the idea that there might have been fully technological civilizations of humans on earth that have been totally lost to time. I know that the Maya were not that, but go back 10,000 years maybe, who knows?
Dinosaurs lived on Earth for about 100,000,000 years, at least 50 times as long as our species. Perhaps some dinosaurs were the most advanced species our planet has ever seen.
I read a stat (maybe not true?) that we've only found around one dinosaur fossil for each 10,000 years that they existed. Maybe we just haven't found peak dino society yet-
if you broke humanity down into one archaeological find per 10k years you probably wouldn't think we had much of a society either.
Most of the time, dino bones don't fossilize. And we only find some small fraction of the small fraction that do. But with glass and ceramics the situation is different. Those are stable in almost all conditions, running water excepted. A beach will break down a coke bottle in a few years but if it lands just about anywhere else it has a high chance of lasting basically forever.
If dinosaurs ever became like us, there should be a clear layer in the rock where they started throwing their trash on the ground.
If dinosaurs had changed their environment as much as humans, there would probably be more than the occasional fortuitously preserved corpse or footprint to find.
They lived so long ago, my understanding is such artifacts would be extremely unlikely to survive. We also haven't looked in that many places at that depth.
Maybe? Depends on what level of manufacturing and materials they achieved. Even then, not super likely. Statistically, bones don't survive that long :) It could just be a matter of time till we find a lucky break.
Maybe not full-blown technology, but a lot of New World philosophy, art, and mathematics, and history were destroyed by the Europeans or otherwise lost to time. Maybe even medicines that we don’t know about. They didn’t have electric computers though.
I'm not sure what "fully technological" means, but if they had made anything at scale out of durable materials like stone or ceramic we would most likely have seen some indication.
What we do probably underestimate is how advanced ancient hominids were. They mostly worked with materials that decay like wood, plants, and animal skin. But we're slowly learning that they were more advanced than we used to believe.
Any former civilization that is any sizable fraction of ours with same level of tech would have been spotted long ago. Well unless Atlantis is real somehow sunk 3 miles down
An interesting theory (albeit likely sci-fi) is that on a long enough timescale, any existence of an advanced precursor society will have been lost by tectonic plates sliding down. But that's a timescale of hundreds of millions of years (apparently the earth is ~4.5 billion years old, human life that left traces of intelligence behind is a percentage of a percentage of that)
You mean like the Aztecs (and other civs) before them? Humans gonna human. I think we have to always look at the whole story and not just what’s currently popular to demonize.
Their actions were still unique in many ways. And the Spanish’s action were an order of magnitude more consequential. The Aztecs warred and pillage other groups but were not in the business of wiping centuries of knowledge off the face of the earth nor did they ever manage or desire to kill 90% of all peoples of central Mexico.
Considering that the seas were hundreds of feet lower, and most settlements are built on coasts and waterways for transport and food harvesting purposes, it is very likely that anything left before the last ice age was destroyed by rising seas and any remnants are far offshore.
Yes, it would be a sobering reminder on how essentially powerless we are in the face of global calamity. You see this recognized in religions and in pre-technological societies, but few of us in the modern era do.
That means we squandered almost 10,000 years of human history before humans became an advanced civilization. We could have invented flight, discovered antibiotics, etc five thousand years ago.
Most of the clocks we’re racing against are ones we invented in the last 200 or so years. So the other 9,800 years weren’t really squandered, the clock really wasn’t ticking so much back then.
Squandered implies it was somehow a meaningful loss, at least that’s how I interpreted it.
It was meaningless time. If we’d gotten to our current development level ~5000 years ago, we’d just be writing these same comments next to calendars that had their zero sent to ~7000 years ago.
We still wouldn’t be alive 5000 years ago. That part doesn’t change. I think you’re confusing yourself.
Half of Europeans that died during the great plague would’ve benefited, for example. Most people who were born in the past 150 years would still be alive.
I’m not at all confused. But we’re somehow talking past each other. Which I probably contributed to too, although that wasn’t my intent, so sorry for the mix up. Anyway, it is just silly chitter-chatter so I think it is not worth sorting out where we’ve missed each other.
You’re taking a radically different past, and then somehow arriving at the conclusion that any part of history that we current know would have still happened.
https://pbfcomics.com/comics/dinosaur-meteors/