Thought this’d be relevant:
(XKCD)
Actual mechanical preservation is only one part of the equation, though. The stuff still has to get buried and incorporated into some sort of sediments, get lithified, and then be brought back up to the surface for discovery at just the right time. That process is always going on somewhere in the world, so a widely distributed culture using stone tools and such would have a pretty good chance of getting at least a few artifacts preserved and potentially discovered. If it were a only limited to a small area, though, it would have to be an area with just the right geologic setting and subsequent history. Even if our hypothetical local civilization has a high population and persists for a long time, unless it’s in just the right geologic setting it’s not getting preserved.
Mechanical preservation is a big part of the equation - preservation of fossil remains requires very exacting conditions and preservation of rocks does not. Granted, they may never be found if they were deposited in a small area that happens not to be later exposed at the right time.
The whole notion is slightly absurd though, as it is very difficult to imagine a species capable of (say) knapping flint, much less making pottery, being confined to a small area through its entire history.
What side of that equation do stone tools fall on, though?
Also, A Short History Of Nearly Everything says fossils are hard to make and all the humans that have lived aren’t enough to make a complete human skeleton. Is this an accepted fact?
I have no idea what this means. Since every human has a complete human skeleton, then on it’s face, no. Since many human fossils have been found, then on its face, no.
It meant the probability of being fossilized requires fortuitous conditions, and not enough humans have lived to expect a complete skeleton. I might search for the quote.
Then, no. Fossilized remains of more than 6,000 individuals have been found, from complete skeletons to skulls or teeth.
I think Lemur really nailed it. The biggest problem for me comes from an evolutionary examination of history - these creatures simply didn’t have the tools. Nothing back then that we’ve ever found had any sort of large brain capable of the type of intellect required for a major civilization. I mean, it’s possible, but the more you look at the complete dearth of evidence where we would expect evidence, the more it shifts into sci-fi territory.
It’s not only volcanism and glaciation that would threaten the remains of a 100-million year old civilization. Giant impacts and the resulting firestorms and global effects could have neatly wiped out all traces of such a civilization, especially if the civilization was fairly localized and the impactor hit relatively close to home.
What if they blew themselves to smithereens with a strategic nuclear exchange or three? We might not find enough traces or them then.
Your link appears to use the term “complete” very, very loosely. According to this, the most complete early human skeleton ever found comprises 108 bones, which is only about half of the bones that a human his age should have, and from the photos, some of those 108 are not complete, either. Since most human fossil remains found are just a few teeth or small bone fragments, it may indeed be the case that we don’t have enough for a complete skeleton, assuming we’re not allowed to use a leg bone to replace an arm bone or whatever.
But my link could be wrong, too. More expert commentary on this would be welcome.
Both of these suffer from the “does not cover a large enough area” problem. And in addition:
mandala: Chicxulub wiped out the dinosaurs and the last ammonites - did it remove “all traces” of them? No. And how much much less likely is it to have done so if they’d had a material culture. And can you point to evidence for a 100 Ma impact large enough to have done so? One that left no other extinction traces?
AK84: we can pick up traces of a 1.7 billion-yo natural reactor - I think we’d detect the traces of a nuclear exchange large enough to wipe out every single material trace of a civilization advanced enough to be building nuclear weapons in the first place :smack: . At the very least we’d find a 100Ma-dated layer of radioactive glass, the same way we found the iridium anomaly at the K-Pg boundary.
The dinosaurs were around for 135 million years.
Somewhere, sometime, there was a first city. What if through incredible bad luck, an asteroid landed smack on it the day after it reached “city” status, wiping out all traces of the city and relatively nearby proto-cities, and causing enough global disruption to exterminate the rest of the species that built it, so there were never any other cities from that species?
Again, I point to the “utterly impossible” in the thread title.
I dunno, combine Turkana Boy and Mungo Man and I think you’re most of the way to a full skeleton’s worth of bones. Add in the buried Neanderthalsand we’d have a whole mess of bones.
That first city was (likely) in Anatolia or the Levant. At the tail-end of a trail of hard artefacts stretching, at that time, all the way back to the Cape of Good Hope and with tentacles reaching to South America and Australia.
No single event is going to wipe out all that evidence. None.
I started out saying “Highly improbable”, but you know what? I’m going to say yes, it is, in fact, impossible for anything we’d call a civilization to have existed 100 MA and us not know about it. Utterly impossible.
But again, you’re talking about a specific trail of evidence from a specific, um, species. But the sequence of stone tools for many thousands of years before agriculture doesn’t seem obligatory to me.
What if 100 million years ago, there was a rapid and localized jump in intelligence, and some non-human brainiac just happened to notice that plants grew where he threw away his seeds? And so they had agriculture before they had stone tools, and the incredibly fertile ground and clement weather where they lived made farming with wooden tools sufficient for their population? And then just when they got their city going, the asteroid hit?
TonySinclair, I think that when we postulate “a rapid and localized jump in intelligence” that leads to “some non-human brainiac just happened to notice that plants grew where he threw away his seeds” without the prior development of stone tools or other artifacts we are clearly straying into the Alien Space Bats type of conjecture.
The phrase “utterly impossible” is, quite literally, meaningless if you can throw in such ‘what if’ scenarios. Based upon what we know about intelligent species, at least about the genus Homo, dispersion happens much earlier than true control of the environment. In fact, that very lack of control is what many consider to be the prime motivator for dispersion.
But, again, this is a hypothetical. The only scenario I can see that would allow this in any statistically meaningful sense would be for the civilization to be an extraterrestrial outpost that was underwater near a subduction zone. They planned for their traces to be unknown and after millions of years of genetic engineering, they returned to their own homeworlds. They left behind the result of their magnificent project, a species of Artiodactyla that eventually would evolve into the entire order of Cetacea.
And so there is your proof of such a civilization. How else could something much like a cow (except clumsier) decide to migrate to the ocean and over millions of years become the mistresses of the undersea realms? It is obvious proof of undetectable alien intervention 100 Million Years Ago.
To somewhat argue from the other side now, I don’t think it’s entirely implausible to imagine a situation in which an intelligent species and primitive civilization emerged on an island arc or microcontinent and left no trace today. There’s many examples of “exotic terranes” in the rock record which were chunks of continental crust that due to whatever vagaries of tectonics wound up moving along with an oceanic plate until the bit of plate they were on got subducted. Because continental crust doesn’t subduct they just get smashed into the side of the overriding continent. A lot of northwest North America is made up of these. They’re readily identifiable in the rock record but the process of them getting squashed into the bigger continent tends to jumble and deform them, resulting in very few well-preserved sedimentary rocks.
So, imagine a situation where a small microcontinent (say Japan or New Zealand sized) gets separated from the overall worldwide biologic assemblage and goes on its own evolutionary path for a few tens of millions of years and eventually an intelligent species and a primitive civilization arise. But perhaps by the time that happens, the microcontinent is thousands and thousands of miles from any other land. The ancient Polynesians managed long sea voyages with relatively primitive seafaring technology, but without shorter voyages being possible first I’m not sure they would have figured it out. So then if something kills off the civilization before it manages to get to a technological point in which it discovers the rest of the world, and then a few dozen million years later their microcontinent gets plastered onto a bigger continent, it’s very possible there would be no evidence of their existence.
The paleogeography of some (but not all) of these exotic terranes are fairly well known, but I don’t know if any of them fit with about the right timescale for the above scenario to be plausible.
My point is you’re using a sample size of one. And even with humans, there was a lot of variance. The wheel was so widespread across Europe and the Middle East 5000 years ago that we don’t even know who had it first, but except for a few children’s toys, there’s no sign of it in the preColumbian Western Hemisphere.
IMO there is nothing mandatory about the sequence that human technology followed. And we know for a fact that even in our own history, technology didn’t progress at the same rate in different regions. There were early civilizations in the Indus Valley and China, but they evidentlly didn’t invent the wheel, either. They had to wait thousands of years for it to spread to them from wherever it was invented.
If, say, Australia could be thousands of years behind Europe in metallurgy and the like, then there’s no reason it couldn’t have been thousands of years ahead of the rest of the world. The wheel and metallurgy and agriculture had to start somewhere. Probably three different places, but nothing says it had to be that way. If theystarted in e.g. Jericho, it could spread all over Europe and Asia. If it started in Australia, then couldn’t. It follows that there’s no reason that a civilization thousands of years ahead of the rest of the world couldn’t have been limited to a single, isolated continent.
And a sufficiently huge disaster could either obliterate or make inaccessible the evidence of such a civilization, while also exterminating the uncivilized members of that species over the rest of the world.
I dont think it happened, but I don’t see why it’s utterly impossible.