# How likely is it that there are undiscovered long-lost ancient buildings in the world?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-likely-is-it-that-there-are-undiscovered-long-lost-ancient-buildings-in-the-world/965473>\
**Category:** In My Humble Opinion\
**Created:** [May 31, 2022, 11:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-likely-is-it-that-there-are-undiscovered-long-lost-ancient-buildings-in-the-world/965473 "2022-05-31T23:09:35Z")\
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**Author:** ![Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/13edae/32.png) [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stranger_On_A_Train)\
**Post date:** [June 2, 2022, 1:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-likely-is-it-that-there-are-undiscovered-long-lost-ancient-buildings-in-the-world/965473/43 "2022-06-02T01:12:56Z")

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> [@EastUmpqua](#):
>
> There are gaps in the fossil record. The further back you go in time, the longer the gaps. Humans have had technology for maybe 6000 years. With our current fossil record of the Cretaceous, I don’t think we have that kind of precision.

Human technology goes back much further than 6000 years; the Neolithic “founder crops” have been cultivated for at least twelve millennia, and evidence of husbandry of pigs and sheep even slightly further back. Of course, humans and their predecessors have been using ‘technology’ in the form of fire for over a million years, and there is evidence of the manufacture and use of stone tools by _Australopithecus afarensis_ more than 3.3 million years ago.

We have enough of a fossil record to observe with near certainty that no species (plural) during the pre-_Cenozoic_ period emerged with anything like the grasping appendages needed for complex tool use and manufacture. Such a development should have left a long lineage of evolutionary development and, if they had expanded to the extent of even the Late Antiquity, that is still a couple hundred million bodies which should have left something in the fossil record, if not their own fossils then evidence of hunting or wide scale agriculture over a period of at least tens if not hundreds of thousands of years of development and expansion.

Stranger

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