Advanced dinosaur civilization

Factual Questions
181

We know that ALL of the then-exant non-avian dinosaur clades were terminated by the results of Chicxulub, so why do you find this unbelievable or unrealistic?

OUR civilization developed this way, but is this a necessary precursor for some other civilization?

Remember, humans spread around the globe mostly by walking; we evolved in a geologic era in which there were no vast ocean gaps between the continents we settled. Even the gap between Timor and Sahul (Greater Australia) was less than 60 miles at times. We can prove true long-distance seafaring, purposefully sailing to a place you couldn’t see from your starting place, only beginning with the Austronesian expansion ca. 3000 BC, by which time there were Sumerian city-states already several thousand years old.

Meanwhile, in the late Cretaceous period, India for example was out in the middle of the Tethys Ocean hundreds of miles from the nearest landmass; Australia and Antarctica were joined to each other, but not to anything else; Africa had separated from South America but wasn’t yet close to Eurasia. Any terrestrial lifeform would not be able to see there was any other place out there, so why would they have gone looking? HOW would they have gone looking, given what we know of the development of seafaring from island-hopping to long-distance voyaging?

Why would their tools have necessarily been stone?

That’s part of thinking about what a civilization not just like ours might look like: what makes stone tools a necessary step in their evolution? I don’t see any real path to, say, space-faring that doesn’t include stone tools, but is space-faring a necessary part of being a civilization? No.

Abundant artifact evidence in a very constrained geographic area in a time that is but a geological eye-blink separated from us. Everything we know about Easter Island civilization, e.g., is contained in 63 square miles and the last thousand years (maybe 1500, maybe). What is the likelihood that any given 63 square miles will survive for 65 million years?

Picked it up off the ground? Broke it off living trees? Pulled up saplings out of the ground? If you live in or near a woodland, there’s wood all around.

No, they were processing those materials with their hands. We already have evidence for dinosaurs that could grasp materials with their hands.

I think Gobekli Tepe does qualify as civilization, but if you don’t, then just move ahead to the first civilization you do recognize: Sumer, Mohenjo Daro, ancient Egypt, whatever. There was a point in human history where “civilization” was not a globe-spanning thing, but instead geographically confined to one or a handful of locations. If another asteroid came by and caused a Chicxulub-scale catastrophe during the Egyptian Old Kingdom, what is the likelihood that in 65 million years evidence would be found?

I don’t understand where you’re going with these statements. If human civilization had never developed at all, that doesn’t mean the fruits, berries, grains, nuts, seeds, roots, shellfish, mammoths, etc., etc., on which the various primate species have been feeding also vanished. Most of the ecosystems and bioscapes and geology in which we developed would have looked pretty much the same if we’d never existed at all, because it is only in the last ten or fifteen millennia that humans have made large-scale changes to our environment in ways that are unambiguously “us.”

No, all of the steps need not survive: the fossil record contains lots of gaps that will never be filled. (For example, South African caves are a major source for early hominid fossils, but the caves [only accumulated fossils during dry eras (U–Pb-dated flowstones restrict South African early hominin record to dry climate phases | Nature)] (probably paywalled PDF); the steps that happened during wet eras did not survive.) Even if all of the steps do survive, however, how many would be recognizably and unambiguously leading to dinosaur civilization before the last couple?

182

I posit that the OP is probably interested in exploring exactly those concepts, and what civilization-adjacent structures could be detected, or at least not ruled out. There are factual questions here even if the idea is a little fuzzy.

Civilization has criteria, but it’s not like it’s as fixed and narrow a concept as, say, a hydrogen atom. There is wiggle room. And there are criteria that, even if we want to preserve, we should consider generalizing. For instance, is a writing system strictly necessary? What if there was an entirely different method for preserving information in physical form? Or what if it was less necessary in the first place due to profoundly greater memory (for example)? How about agriculture? Agriculture might be simply impossible for other species, but other forms of high-output food production might be possible.

183

Because we know what the clades who terminated earlier than Chicxulub were like, and none of them were heading for intelligence.

I emphatically reject any notion of civilization that just magically appears without a long precursor stage as pure fantasy.

None of the continents you’ve just mentioned have any signs of dinosaur intelligence. I’m rejecting the idea that civilization would develop in just one spot on those continents without any precursors that cover the whole continent. If you’re saying the whole of India or Africa is your Lost Valley, then my point about zero evidence stands.

What else would they have been?
Wood? Naah, you can’t process wood to any degree without stone (or possibly shell, like on some Polynesian islands,but that still leaves traces)

No, across a whole continent, minimum. Else it’s just magical Lost Valley bullshit.

And processed with their teeth?

Are you fucking kidding me? Do you think Native Americans didn’t use tools?

Really? Where are this civilization’s houses?

Once again: The evidence would have been everywhere

184

They wouldn’t need them, but if they don’t have them, they’re not a civilization.

I can’t stress this enough - cities are the defining feature of civilization. It’s not up for debate, large urban settlement is a necessary condition to calling a society a civilization. Even the systems theorist approach looks at networks of cities.

185

Perhaps. But in my culture, the defining characteristic of a city is that it has been given that label by the monarch. If QEII decided that Bempton gannet colony was a city, it would be a city.

In the reasonably near future, city status may be granted to a virtual network of online locations, and there could be virtual cities distributed across the globe - quite possibly with their own systems of government, and taxation, on-line infrastructure, and even defence. This would be a civilisation, even if we all lived in individual log cabins or yurts miles apart from each other.

If the dinosaurs somehow managed to create a virtual civilisation consisting only of networks of communication, (perhaps through complex songs, or via fungal mycorrhizal networks, or semaphores, or something even more bizarre) that would be analogous to the virtual human cities of the future.

186

That’s kind of irrelevant to the scientific concept of a city as studied by geographers, anthropologists, archaeologists, etc…

Used to be, in your culture, a city had a cathedral. Now, it’s royal edict. Doesn’t change the physical city at all (BTW, the UK system is just insane, it’s completely fucking ridiculous that Stanley, pop. 2000, is a city and Reading, pop. 300 000, still isn’t)

Not to geographers, anthropologists, sociologists or anyone that mattered for this discussion.

You do understand that what’s relevant isn’t “city status”, which is a human political construct, but cities, the complex large physical urban centres right?

No. This would be a post-civilization. And it would not have been possible without the civilization stage first. It relies on the technological products that civilization produced.

Without storage records?

You’re describing whalesong, and whales are not a civilization.

Aah, so we’re moving from pure fantasy to science fiction? How the green hells do dinosaurs develop “fungal mycorrhizal networks” without ever using technology to see what they’re working with or provide inputs into and take information from the system?

No, without information storage it’s just one dinosaur yelling from the top of a hill, and others replying. That’s not analogous to a distributed technological society. Howler monkeys aren’t a civilization.

I really need to start making a list of all the things I’ve had to explain aren’t civilizations in this thread…

Here’s another one, that might maybe get through: Pyramid builders (either continent)? A civilization. Stonehenge builders? Not a civilization. Having a middling-complex social structure and achieving monumental artefacts is not sufficient to be considered a civilization. Dinos waving flags at each other from hilltops is like Stonehenge, not the Pyramids.

187

Good point. I do believe charcoal associated with nesting complexes would explode the current view of dino culture. But, to recognize animal civilizations one would first have to define ‘animal civilization’. It is not human civilization and would not leave the same artifacts.

188

Well, it is a bit of a reach, but I’m trying to imagine a civilisation with few or no non-biological components. To make such a network complex enough to be called a civilisation, one needs a data transmission, storage and processing system, something that a mycorrhizal net might be capable of. Of course it could take millions of years of selective breeding to get to that stage.
Maybe a system of knotted ropes and vines like quipu would be more achievable, although I quite like the possibility of organic data processing that moulds and fungi might afford.

189

Which these dinos are going to be spending their time doing, why? Only the end result there is functional, why are they going to spend their time developing it (without any scientific equipment). Because they just know that a fungal network is going to be useful?

How are they even going to know mycorrhizal networks exist, without the ability to compare specimens from one side of a forest to the other, or to track transfers? Suzanne Simard wasn’t tasting hyphae with her tongue at various points, she used isotope tracers.

Hell, we’d really like to reliably grow porcini, and we can’t manage that yet, despite throwing some quite impressive science at it. But these dinosaurs are going to reliably manage something orders of magnitude more complex, just on spec and with only their claws, teeth and limited senses?

Fantasy. The “bit of a reach” there is to the heliopause.

Sure, I fully allow the remote possibility that some missing dinosaur group came up with a completely organic system like that.

Why did they do it, though? States come first, then recordkeeping.

190

Oddly enough, an Isaac Arthur SFIA video on this exact topic just came out. I haven’t watched it yet so unsure what it says, will share my thoughts later.

191

And here’s where the thread died. It was a mercy killing.

192

I know we are getting into odd territory, but I don’t think this sort of speculation is entirely inappropriate. Should we expect a dinosaur civilisation to be a carbon-copy of human civilisation? Would they necessarily follow the human route of stone age/bronze age/iron age/electronic age, or could they follow a different path?
I suspect that if we could examine all the different alien civilisations in the local universe in detail (if indeed any exist at all), we would find that they occupy a wide and complicated phase space which may include civilisations which have more complicated relationships with the local biology and biochemistry. But it is difficult to imagine such a civilisation in any detail, since we have only the data from our own civilisation as a starting point.

I’m really thinking about the possibility of the sort of selective breeding that agriculturalists do to their crops and farm animals. Even ants appear to have significantly modified the various fungi and moulds that grow inside their larders - these species are found nowhere else, and are apparently completely isolated from the fungi found outside in the wild, so to speak. This process has taken tens of millions of years, at least. A hypothetical biologically-based civilisation might emerge after tens of millions of years of husbandry, and have remarkable results.

Maybe the first thing they’d develop would be beer. I’m not sure if that would be a stimulus or impediment.

193

What do you mean by “intelligence”? Dino’s are intelligent today, and honestly the fossil evidence of the smarter birds does not scream huge brains.

I have agreed that an advanced dino civilization is impossible. But intelligent dinos? Making simple wood tools, woven houses (dinos make those today), a society, a language, communal food gathering and storage are all possible.

Now sure, to get past that stage, you have to first make stone tools, and there are none. So if there was such a Dino society, it ended before what most people would call civilization.

You have to have stone houses in the temple(?) area to be civilized? They can’t be nearby?

Still, there isn’t any evidence suggesting people actually lived at Gobekli Tepe. There were no burials and no apparent homes. So, to better understand who the site’s visitors were, scientists were forced to look to the nearby countryside.When they did, they found signs that for centuries before Gobekli Tepe appeared, Stone Age hunter-gatherers in the region seemed to be building small, permanent settlements where they lived communally, sharing their foraged resources. If that’s confirmed, then such sharing might have helped spawn the creation of society.

Others disagree. Your opinion does not define the term. I also think the “Mound Builders” of N America are a civilization.

194

Let us make some things very clear here-

There are Dinos who have human level intelligence.

There are Dinos who use tools, and some even kinda make tools.

There are Dinos who make complex homes using their beaks, etc.

Dinos can have a language, a society, etc.

So, saying intelligent Dinos are impossible is just plain wrong.

That being said- it is pretty much impossible for Dinos to have had an advanced civilization. If we very loosely define “civilization” then the possibility is there of some sort of “civilization” sure, but nothing that got anywhere near “advanced”.

195

So? That’s equivalent to some future species saying, if Chicxulub II wiped us out tomorrow, that none of the mammalian clades terminated beforehand were headed for intelligence, so obviously none of the clades terminated at that moment, including the primates, were so headed.

Again, so? That’s not what we’re talking about.

Suppose that in our human story, Africa was slightly offset such that it had the same climate but wasn’t close to Eurasia: no Sinai, no easy crossing of the Red Sea. The development from Proconsul to Homo erectus went the same way, but there was no spread beyond Africa. Modern humans developed in Africa, but again had no “out of Africa” moment in prehistory: we were confined to our continent of origin. That would obviously have changed things quite a bit (no Lascaux, no Denisovans, maybe nobody ever domesticated the dog, etc., etc.), but would the changes have been sufficient as to preclude the development of civilization?

I’d argue no. The development of farming and urbanization and politics and religion and writing in the Nile Valley would have likely followed a little bit different course on maybe a different timeline, but the basic leap forward would still have happened (even as the Maya made that leap without knowing anything about the pharoahs). Do you argue otherwise?

Human civilization involved a worldwide spread and then civilization in multiple loci, but is that worldwide expansion really a necessary component, or merely an accident of history?

If you accept that human civilization could have developed on only one continent (and then spread from there as the Nile boatmen learned to expand their range), then why could some other species not do the same? It would still include a very long precursor stage, but a stage that wasn’t worldwide.

That does mean that if the clade was terminated before their civilization spread very far, then the evidence they ever existed would be confined to one continent. You couldn’t look in North America for something that never made more than a few halting expansions from Africa into the Near East, e.g., before the fire came by.

The amount of looking that has been done on the various continents varies widely. North America, Europe, and Mongolia/southern Siberia/northern China have been extensively surveyed and excavated. Meanwhile, Antarctica, for obvious reasons, has not been well-studied except for a few mostly-marginal spots. Large swathes of Australia don’t have near-surface sediments of the right age to study. In India, the Deccan Traps and the Himalayan orogeny have reduced the area where one might expect to find late Cretaceous evidence. Parts of Africa are very well studied, but huge areas either don’t have the right geology or don’t have the political stability (or both). Nations struggling to feed their current population tend to have less money and less interest in studying what happened there many millions of years ago, and the known fossil record is very unevenly distributed.

You are falling into a very anthropocentric viewpoint: human teeth would not be useful, but we’re not talking about humans. Some dinosaurs had beaks, while others had teeth very different from ours. We know there are birds that can use their beaks for drilling, plucking, pulling and tearing, etc.; what would a beak need to look like to manipulate plant material for building? What about their feet/claws? What kinds of tools would they have needed or desired given their physical attributes and limitations?

Never said any such thing.

That’s one of the great as-yet-unsolved mysteries of Gobekli Tepe, but largish groups of people came together there to work cooperatively to build large structures, so they had to live somewhere, and there is evidence for local villages and settlements.

You seem to be under the misapprehension that because some fossil/artifact sites have survived for a million or even two million years, they would necessarily have survived for 65 million. That’s false.

Time destroys. That’s an immutable fact of archaeology and paleontology. The number of sites from any given era declines over time. Water and wind erosion are the primary culprits in the short term; over the longer term ice (glaciation) and various tectonic processes (volcanism, orogeny, subduction, etc.) come into play. It would be an extraordinary series of events to destroy ALL of the evidence, but it would be equally extraordinary if ALL of the evidence survived as well, and the farther back into time you go, the less you’d expect to survive.

We don’t even have evidence from “everywhere” for places where we’re pretty sure ancient peoples lived: the Denisovans, e.g., are positively known from just two sites (one in Siberia and another in Tibet), but the genetic evidence from their descendants suggests they ranged over a huge area of east and southeast Asia. There are some areas where field surveys have turned up a lot of Paleolithic sites (e.g., the Luonan Basin in Shannxi, China, where they didn’t even start serious field surveys in the area until the mid-1990s), but even today there are plenty of regions in China that have not been well-studied. There’s a single site on the Lena River in Siberia (Diring Yuriakh) where tools have been tentatively dated to more than 240,000 years ago, but there’s no comparable site anywhere remotely close: for all of the evidence, there were a group of ancient humans living there more than a thousand miles from their nearest neighbors, which seems, um, unlikely.

That’s a time period relatively close to our own, and a lot of evidence is lacking. Go back another few million years, and even less will be preserved and accessible. After 65 million years, how much of what originally there will still be extant and accessible? Is it actually reasonable to expect that there will be widespread evidence even for something that was itself widespread?

As a sidenote, a team of researchers calculated a few years ago that 2.5 billion T. rex lived over the course of several million years. Thirty-two of them have been found.

Is that an immutable law? Hunter-gatherer societies extant in the recent past, for example, had a form of recordkeeping (oral history, ancestor lists, and so forth) even in the absence of anything we’d regard as a “state.” Written recordkeeping seems to have become established in human society at the point where it became necessary to determine who owned what property (and what part of the property belonged to the king/pharaoh/local big shot). However, is that necessarily the only circumstance powerful enough to drive the birth of recordkeeping?

196

Why? Bowerbirds accumulate things from the environment, which in their case often means blue plastic junk, to sexify their mating pads. Burnt wood exists in the natural world and may easily have been used as a chick magnet in the past. We’ve been banging on about how the complexity of natural animal behaviour should not be mistaken as a civilisation proxy for at least 190 posts.

The bigger issue in the thread is that in human history there is a continuum between cavepersons and Chicago. Clearly at some point ‘civilisation’ happened, but the people who know about this stuff and look at it for a living find it incredibly difficult to pinpoint exactly when. The problem is that ‘civilisation’ is a term loaded with implicit meanings about human cultural development and achievement [and a fair bit of 19th C evolutionary racism and bullshit yet to be unpacked] most of which changed gradually over millenia. So much of complex human behaviour is definitely present in contexts where it is clearly is not a civilisation in the simplistic terms that people are using that word here.

Could dinosaurs do any of the things humans achieved as cultural behaviour in sharing ideas and knowledge and engaging with their environment in a different way? Not even close.

197

I disagree, since IMHO dinos do those things today.

198

It should be clear from the context and thrust of this thread that I mean intelligence enough to produce a civilization, and from my own arguments intelligence enough to produce the tools to do so.

I’m not, and never have, argued that dinosaurs might not have possibly developed high intelligence. Things that leave zero fossil record aren’t really of interest to me. The OP, on the other hand, was speculating about something specific that would leave an artefact record.

Feel free to speculate about Dinosaur Tree Elves in their woven nests with their poetic song-language and chewed twig tools until the hadrosaurs come home. That’s not the OP’s premise, and not what I’m arguing against in this thread.

The houses in your article weren’t “nearby” in any civilization sense. “Huts scattered across the countryside” are very much not “a city”. When I said “where are this civilization’s houses”, I did mean at the site itself. Civilizations don’t build temples away from the city. Tombs, sure. Monasteries, even. Temples for worship? Naah - if anything, they tend to be the very heart of the city, even more so than the palace.

You can cite me an archaeologist’s paper referring to the “Wessex civilization” rather than “Wessex culture”, or “Bell Beaker civilization” rather than “Bell Beaker culture”, then, right?

Well, one of the Mound Builder cultures was, at any rate, no argument from me

When scientists say “Human level[sic] intelligence”, they don’t mean that it maxes out at equivalent to a seven-year old.

Only by a complete stretch of the word “make”, going by what I’ve read about crow tools (which doesn’t include your subscription-locked article - maybe quote the relevant bit, yes?) Crows can assemble human-made parts into more complex tools. That’s not the same as “making tools”.

No-one’s said that, so I don’t know who you’re arguing with here.

199

Well, except for all those stone artefacts we’ve left scattered around …

So, you’re saying we should expect to see an artefact record?

The Egyptians didn’t develop agriculture. They grew crops that were domesticated elsewhere. Cut off the Fertile Crescent, and there’s no guarantee things progress as they do. West Africa and the Ethiopian Highlands are the only African loci of origin.

And I don’t agree that the leap forward would have happened without the entirety of Eurasia to spread through. Some innovations (stitched clothing, for instance) only happened when facing certain kinds of adversity not common in Africa.

IMO, it was necessary.

Stone tools aren’t fossils, they are more durable and much, much easier to find, and would still show up even in e.g. Himalayan strata.

Human teeth are more useful for this kind of thing than dinosaur dentition.

Beaks like turtles, not beaks like birds (except the actual birds, of course)

I’m unfamiliar with the dinosaurs that had teeth like beavers…

What about them? Dinosaurs couldn’t pronate their forelimbs.

Then that was just a non sequitur.

It’s not “unsolved”, there are no houses on the site.

So, not at Gobekli Tepe, then. Like I said.

Some proportion of them would.

I don’t need a lecture in archaeology or geology, thanks.

That’s my point.

Do you think I’m under the delusion that the stone tools we’ve found are all the stone tools ever produced? Because otherwise, what are you even arguing against?

No, but it’s the way to bet.

Until they start keeping it in a permanent form, it’s not the kind of recordkeeping we’re talking about.

Whalesongs, again…

200

I wonder how quantifiable this is.

For example, let’s pick a time interval, say 100 million years ago plus and minus 5 million years. What fraction of the Mesozoic landscape of that interval was within 1000 miles of any location that’s been explored by scientists?

Of course, we can pick other intervals and other distances, and over enough of them, we can get a good picture of the level of exploration.