It all depends on your definition of civilization.
Meriam Webster definition 1.B:“the culture characteristic of a particular time or place”
Communal migration and nesting, care of the young and a bit of learned behavior. I wouldn’t expect much more for Dino-Culture. That’s more civilized than most popular representations of dinosaurs.
As a reminder, my question is
I’m fairly certain that what is consistent with our current body of evidence from geology and paleontology is testable.
Sure, Several late Paleolithic “civilizations” existed. Gobekli Tepe may be one of them. But we found the ruins and we found the tools. Flint tools last nigh forever, and so do the fossil bones that show that those animals were butchered and killed with them.
One can even call the great Aztec and Mayan Civilizations non-technological.
We have all the evidence - there are no tools preserved alongside or contemporaneous with dinosaurs. If we find dinosaur fossils, we should find dinosaur tools.
Also, no dinosaur we’ve found has looked like it had human intelligence, anatomically.
Nope. We’d have found the tools, because we found the dinosaurs.
And not Antarctica, at the time the dinsosaurs went extinct, it wasn’t that isolated.
All of them can be excluded. The only dinosaur civilization that can’t be excluded is one where space aliens picked up some non-intelligent dinosaurs in 66 Ma BCE and evolved them elsewhere.
No. Stone tools and the signs of stone tool manufacture don’t disappear that easily.
If the fossils survive, the stone tools would survive - be even more likely to have survived, in fact.
No, we would
Yes, it does. At a minimum, civilization requires urbanization. It’s definitional. Anything else is a culture, not a civilization.
It is good enough. There, you’ve been answered.
How? How, exactly, do you “exploit geothermal energy” without pipes and generators?
This is not a civilization:
You know we can tell what was growing in a place millions of years ago, right? “Biological technology” would show in the paleoecology. Which is a thing people actively study.
How do they chop down the timber to make their wooden windmills?
Ceramics are just about as persistent in the archaeological record as stone tools.
Not using any sensible contextual definition of “technological” (which rules out the " relating to, or involving technology, especially moderns scientific technology." definition) They had metal casting, for Pete’s sake.
Kuzegesagt recently did a video on this topic, interesting, though a bit light on detail.
What body of evidence exists for dinosaur civilization?
What? No, one could definitely NOT do that. These were very complex societies with LOTS of technologies.
I think this is an important point. We are only finding the fossils on or near the surface - pretty much the easy ones, like our search for minerals. Are remnants of dino civilization buried deeper and we have not encountered them yet? Or maybe evidence of a primitive, isolated dino culture that existed briefly then ended for some reason is buried under the Himalayas, or has been subducted by plate tectonics, or is deep undersea. Possible? Yes. Plausible? Maybe. Likely? No. Fairly, though, the fossil record for dinosaurs is limited only to the easy places to look.
This thread is about the places and times we haven’t looked. @Dr.Strangelove linked to a Scientific American article that shows where we haven’t looked. Given that sapience evolved at least once in about 8 million years and 3 million square miles, we need that kind of resolution to positively exclude other sapience evolution. If you have better estimates for the time or space needed, go for it.
None, but that is off topic.
Dinosaurs (and their degree of civilization) were probably somewhere between the two extremes pictured here under “The Age of Dinosaurs”
‘Civilization’ is another problem word that requires definition.
Many species live in large groups. Some show high levels of organisation in nests, such as a social insects. Others live in great colonies, such as a sea birds. Or herds on the grasslands. But we do not refer to these groups as civilisations. They are simply adaptions to an environment to exploit a local food source and provide some protection from predators or they group together to procreate.
Tool use, farming, some kind of language to pass on information. We can see some examples of this in some species. But it is very limited, even amongst primates.
On the other hand humans have been civilised ever since they settled as farmers. But evidence of a civilisation is a rarity. The constant churn of the earth’s dynamic surface swallows many secrets. We know only those that have left behind some durable evidence.
It helps if they build out of stone rather than wood or mud, have some kind of writing and use metals and live in places not inundated by water or ice or swallowed by desert sands or jungle. The fossil record is very selective. Flash flood victims and denizens of watery places dominate and we tend to see only an impression of their physical remains if they have hard parts like bones.
For much of the earths existence it has favoured spineless blobs floating around seas. Who knows what they might have been able to evolve into, could clever jellyfish have become civilised and left no trace?
Dinosaurs are merely the bagatelles of the prehistoric world, much loved by Hollywood.
There’s not really any such place. We’ve looked in Antarctica, we’ve looked in Greenland, and all parts in between. If there were signs of tool-using intelligent dinosaurs equivalent to even H. ergaster, we’d have found them.
No. See this earlier thread on ancient civilizations for a discussion of why subduction isn’t the gotcha laymen seem to think.
And do you think the geology of the Himalayas isn’t well-studied?
And the times?
Or times. Although if you’re advocating a Jurassic dino civilization that devolved to the somehow otherwise more sophisticated later dinosaurs, that’s even more of a stretch. Why would it be the physiologically less-advanced dinos that develop this civilization?
If we are to look for this dino civ, it only makes sense that it would be in the Late Cretaceous. Which happens to be the most actively studied time, for various reasons.
This is a good point. I think the difference between a civilization and another localized resource exploitation is that the civilization actively manages the local resource. So, a human group who regularly returns to a site that happens to have cereals growing is not a civilization. But a human group, who modifies that site so that cereals become more abundant, is.
Hmm. Lots of animals do that. I joke to my children that our squirrels are well-provisioned because their ancestors had the forethought to bury acorns.
I’ve lost what you’re talking about because this has nothing to do with what I’m talking about. I’m not advocating any sort dinosaur civilization. I’m trying to exclude possible dinosaur civilizations and want more specific information to do so.
And I’m not sure what “devolve” or “physiologically less-advanced” means in scientific terms. There’s temporally earlier and later species; there’s grouping of species into clades.