…which didn’t affect anything afterwards? Naah.
Also, focusing on the paucity of actual dinosaur fossils is mistaken. Look at how many H. ergaster /H. erectus bones we have. Then look at how many lithic traces we have. Orders of magnitude more artefacts than bones.
Well, you did start out with this OP:
Which could be rephrased as “I am unsatisfied with the state of efforts to prove that Russell’s teapot isn’t orbiting Neptune.” In the strictest mathematical sense, in which we admit every proposition no matter how absurd, it is of course indefensible to state with absolute certainty that there is no such teapot. But in the realm of practical reasoning, we can say that this proposition violates most everything we know about teapots, Neptune, and deep space missions mounted by humanity to date.
If your search space is the time and location of fossils found, then no, we probably haven’t found sufficient fossil sites to rule out… well, some sort of dinosaur social behavior that we haven’t yet seen. But this tool of reasoning is fairly weak compared to the search space of everything that the fossil record has told us about dinosaurs so far. And that search space puts certain limits on what dinosaurs could have been. Again, they lack any type of hand structure for making tools. Their anatomical proportions do not suggest a brain volume or metabolic energy balance budget sufficient to keep an advanced brain running on top of everything else dinosaurs need to do. And we’ve found no evidence whatsoever that dinosaurs ever made a tool.
So I guess I take your point that the search space of time and geography might have big enough to contain fossil evidence of behavior we haven’t seen before. But I suggest that given the constraints we have identified on what we call “dinosaurs”, it is unlikely to the point of absurdity that we would find fossil evidence that challenges assumptions so dramatically that we’d have to consider a level of “sapience” required to support anything we would call “civilization”. Not unless we define “civilization” downward to include behaviors that we don’t customarily put in that category.
I should have looked it up before referencing it, as for some reason, I was remembering it as being in orbit around Jupiter.
Right, and my point was not that we have sent enough probes that we would have had a good chance of detecting it, but in this scenario, we have.
Anyway, to the OP, what defines a civilization to you? That may help to set the bar appropriately. Our ancestors had fire, rudimentary tool use, and at least some level of language long before they had anything that I would consider to be a civilization.
And why would such a civilization be so hard to detect? In the blink of an eye, as far as any useful timescale measures, we spread to every corner of the globe, altering the landscape and leaving our trash. If someone came along 65 million years from now, and did the amount of digging and excavating that we have, they would find unmistakable signs that we were here.
The only scenario that would match the OP’s criteria is some sort of Lost Valley situation where a small group of dinosaurs in a tightly restricted area magically evolved intelligence and tool use only in that locality, in a few million years, and then died off leaving absolutely no trace.
It’s pure fantasy - Homo spread across 3 continents on developing just rudimentary stone tool use and mastering fire, way before even developing civilization. There’s no place that was that isolated at the time - these intelligent dinosaurs would have spread way beyond their Dinotopian valley in short order.
In any case, the idea of intelligence developing in an isolated group like some sort of brains-not-beaks Darwin’s Finch situation is counter to everything we know about the evolution of our own intelligence and the subsequent development of civilization.
Isolation stunts that kind of development, it makes for spectacular dwarfs and giants, lots of interesting specialists, but not smarter animals. Intelligence is being a generalist, not a specialist.
You might first define civilization and look for it in extant species. Then search for associated physical characteristics in dino skulls from the yet unexplored depths of the Australian outback.
In example, Dawkins writes that bats have evolved elaborate sonar modulation technologies that allow them to resolve fine details about their targets. These signals are likely used by other bats in avoiding collisions in the swarm. Humans have only recently (geologic time) recognized this technology. These modulation methods were not understood until humans developed them for RADAR, and realized bats had beat them to it. It is very sophisticated technology.
So, are bats an example of animal civilization? They have advanced technology, communal organization, communication, and care of young, civilized stuff like that. They don’t knap flint or tend fields, but their organization prior to reentering a cave after a night of feeding is highly civilized rather than chaotic or random.
If we are to search for animal civilization, then for what are we looking, and have we already observed it? Perhaps it existed in the communal nesting of known dinosaur populations.
Or, are you just addressing sampling strategies?
No, they don’t. Bat echolocation is not technology. It requires no high level of intelligence to make squeaks and listen for the bounceback. Shrews can do it.
It’s the modulation and interpretation of the return signals that is high tech Phase modulation and frequency scanning are not just squeaks.
What’s intelligence? If you have memorized how to calculate dv/dt with a pencil and a bat can do it intuitively, which is more intelligent.
It’s a matter of style.
Oh yeah, are you saying that sonar is not technology? And I thought the OP is discussing civilization not intelligence.
There’s absolutely no tech in it.
I am.
No, it’s a matter of words having meaning.
Echolocation isn’t sonar. We don’t detect subs and fish by sticking our heads in the water and squeaking.
If you can catch a baseball, then you can do it intuitively as well.
But if you try to launch a rocket based on intuition and not pencil and paper, bad things will happen.
Actually we, and dolphins, do. We jus use more accessories.
So, are you proposing that all technology must be implemented by non-biological tools. That bird navigation, and electrical fields used by sharks are not technology?
No, we don’t.
No. Wooden and bone tools can be tech, too.
Yes, they absolutely are not technology.
But, wait guys - we are discussing the possibility of dinosaur civilization here. Not likely they had many #2 yellow pencils.
So, what’s your definition of civilization?
They may not have #2 pencils, but a writing system of some sort would be required to put them into the category of civilization.
What definition are you using?
I see there are many definitions that agree with you. Strange, they label ‘technology’ a noun then describe a verb.
Sheesh, those poor bats put in all those years to develop frequency scanning echolocation and they don’t get credit. Go figure.
That’s nothing, you should see how much work went into developing the eye and associated brain structures that use it to scan the electromagnetic spectrum to make sense of the surroundings.
But we don’t say that anything with an eye has technology.
Binocular vision is an amazing technology, but dinosaurs did invent that,
This thread has been going on long enough to summarize with strict logic.
What is civilization? Scientists (I’m using the generic word because no one branch is sufficient today: for civilization there would be a range at least from from ethnologists to anthropologists to archaeologists) would define it as an alteration of the landscape and ecosystem by deliberate, planned measures, not innate instincts such as nesting and herding. These would include controlled fires, housing and defensive structures, domestication of foods and animals, import of minerals and food products over distances, creative markings, and many more. Any individual manifestation probably conveys some kind of intelligence - many animals use tools, store food, hunt sophisticatedly, but none combines and multiplies these attributes and an array must appear together over time to indicate a civilization. Note that this definition is universal and does not limit the type of animal or the time of its appearance. It applies equally to dinosaurs, primates, reptiles, or unicorns.
Nothing that comes close to a civilization appears at any point in history until the last years of Homo sapiens. There appears to be three reasons to explain this. 1. None have ever existed. 2. They have existed but in areas so remote or inaccessible that they are at present unfindable. 3. They have existed but in areas where global effects have completely obliterated all traces.
Note that 2. and 3. allow for the possibility of previous civilizations. Can we say anything more about them? Yes. They can be divided in two categories as well. A. Earthly animals. B. Non-earthly animals.
If we look at A., then the presumption is that standard understanding of physiology and evolution apply. Any animal with a civilization is the product of millions of years of tiny changes that can be traced backward from species to genus to family to order to class. Homo sapiens can be traced back through Hominidae to Primates to Mammalia. There are many holes in current understanding of descent but that segment of the bush of life is overall well founded and changes in gross and microscopic anatomy (which now includes DNA) can be tracked with some precision.
Dinosaurs are now placed into two orders: Ornithischia and Theropoda, which includes class Aves or birds. More than a half dozen classes or families lasted until the end of the Cretaceous. Where can one put a complete class or family into this bush of life without damage to the known classifications? It would require the creation of a very short-lived but extraordinarily fast evolving branching that has no known starting point. No dinosaurs appear to have had large brains or tool manipulating hands. Scientists were very happy when a series of human ancestors appeared, because otherwise Homo sapiens can credibly be created supernaturally as a piece. A dinosaur capable of civilization without ancestry would provide an ever deeper dilemma to science. Not only must every trace of the end product have disappeared but every trace of a lineage to that end product must also have done so.
By comparison, B. lacks virtually all of these objections. By definition, non-earthly creatures are not subject to our understanding of evolution and have no place in it. Their arrival here posits an advanced civilization. The timing of one can be laid at any point in earth’s history and can last as long or as little time as they felt warranted. Extraordinary steps could be made to erase, hide, or disguise their presence. In sheer logic, they could be alien forms of life or supernatural beings or a category we don’t have words for. Nothing can be said about them.
In summary. Although science cannot be definitive about events which have left no evidence, logic, history, and the deep understanding of the evidence that is extant places extreme limitations on the likelihood of any earth-creature based civilization at any time. A non-earth-creature based civilization is zillions of times more likely. However, one must remember the total lack of evidence and that zillions times zero is still zero.
It’s not technology, and it wasn’t invented.
But, ya gotta admit that dinosaurs developed binocular vision using biological techniques.
What effect did the forty million years of non-avian dinosaur evolution preceding the Chicxulub strike have on what happened after?
Even a smaller disaster might have wiped out a civilization that had not yet spread too far from its origin. There is some evidence (not yet definitive) that the Youngest Toba volcanic eruption ca. 75K BP came close to wiping out modern humans, for example, and by that time modern humans were already dispersed to several continents. On a more limited scale, the Late Bronze Age Collapse and the collapse of traditional Easter Island society after 1600 show civilizations reverting to drastically simplified forms after a period of development.
Sure, but we have a pretty good idea of what H. erectus tools look like (since they have been found in conjunction with actual fossils) and we’ve got a pretty good idea of what sort of environment H. erectus preferred, so there are a bunch of people looking in likely sites (caves and rock shelters, e.g.) for recognizable traces. If a dinosaur civilization had existed, what sort of environment would they prefer, and what would their tools look like? The answers to those questions may not be the same as for human civilizations: there’s no particular reason to assume that creatures with bodies that don’t look like ours would have had human-like lifestyles or found Olduwan-style tools useful.
As a thought exercise, imagine some species of theropod that developed a level of sapience. Maybe start with something akin to Ornithomimus, which was rather ostrich-like but non-avian. The diet was probably omnivorous or herbivorous and the hands were sloth-like, meaning they could grasp branches and similar objects. Over a span of 20 million years, they develop a larger brain capacity and more grasping ability, and start manipulating their environment to grow more of the plants/foodstuffs they prefer. They develop a language and social structure, and since they live in grasslands and open woodlands close to water, they construct shelters of wood and plant matter rather than stone. Eventually they develop some sort of political organization and religious conception, leading to the organized building of “temples” made of interlaced branches and leaves (maybe something like the wigwams and wickiups of some North American First Nations groups). They never advanced to metalworking or plastics, though, never left the continent of origin, and their society ended abruptly when Chicxulub happened.
Did they have a “civilization” and if so, what evidence would you expect to find for it? Language and social order don’t leave much trace in the fossil record, and the extent to which organic matter is preserved depends very much on the initial conditions of deposition. Where were they building even such primitive structures? If they were building over a widespread area of what became North America over a period of hundreds of thousands of years, I’d expect somebody would have stumbled upon them by now, but if they were on a different continent (maybe modern Australia/Antarctica, or what became the Indian subcontinent), then the relevant geological strata might be far less accessible or accessed. If their building phase lasted only a few hundred or thousand years in a much more restricted geographic area before being snuffed out, then it would be sheer happenstance if anybody ever found the evidence.
As a similar exercise, what would have happened, e.g., if humans had been wiped out by another asteroid a millennium after constructing the first structures at Gobekli Tepe, and then 65 million years later another sentient species goes looking for the evidence of us? I think it rather difficult to argue that the builders of Gobekli Tepe had no civilization, but what is the likelihood that evidence would survive for 65 million years and then be found?