Just curious if anyone has written anything like this. We humans eventually kill ourselves (in any of the usual ways), but leave all sorts of artifacts interesting and mundane laying around (ranging from landfills to various spacecraft, such as the Apollo equipment).
Fast forward 200 million years or so, and intelligent elephants/weasels/birds or something evolves a technological civilization which eventually discovers all these artifacts, and has to come to terms with our reasons for failure such as to learn from them, perhaps also including religious angst because there was another “chosen” species long ago.
Well, it doesn’t take millions of years but Andre Norton’s Breed to Come involves the mutated sentient descendants of several animal species living among the ruins of human civilization. And the future Men of Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men may count; they may sort of be descended from humans but they aren’t human themselves.
The Time Machine by H. G. Wells? The Eloi and Morlocks were future Earth species. A World Out of Time by Larry Niven set three million years in the future.
Both of these depict future human evolved species and are probably not what you’re looking for.
Orson Scott Card’s Children of Earth series is about humans from a distant colony returning to Earth millenia after the native humans had wiped themselves out. The planet is now inhabited by two different native intelligent species, neither descended from the original human inhabitants.
I can’t for the life of me remember what the two species were, or how much they remembered about human civilization, because by that point in the series, the books had turned to utter crap.
“History Lesson” mentioned above is about finding a Disney cartoon (History Lesson - Wikipedia) - not quite the same, but possibly what you’re thinking of
History Lesson, mentioned above, and it was a Disney film reel.
There was The Stone God Awakes by Philip Jose Farmer. A twentieth-century scientist is accidently put into stasis by a time-freezing ray, and it finally wears off twenty million years later. The Earth’s ecology is dominated by a continent-spanning intelligent tree, which hosts multiple sentient species descended from various mammals. Butagain not quite what you’re looking for, a story about a species discovering they weren’t the first intelligent life forms on Earth.
The last episode of 70s-era Battlestar Galactica dealt with this in a way. Apollo and Starbuck intercept a transmission showing the Eagle approaching Earth’s Moon, but never quite manage to identify the originating point of the broadcast.
There is a nice little book by David Macauly called MOTEL OF THE MYSTERIES dealing with what future archeologists discover in the Toot and Come’ On Motel.
Oh, I have that book! It’s hilarious. When the first room is opened and the discoverer is asked if he sees anything he replies “Wonderful things!” Which is exactly what Howard Carter said of the stuff he saw in Tut’s tomb. And the picture of the woman wearing the “sacred artifacts” is a parody of a photo of Heinrich Schlieman’s wife, when she wore the jewelry taken from the site of Troy.
And the modern Battlestar Galactica had the group discovering Earth, but it was barren–having been devastated by, presumably, the wars of the long-dead humans. Except… PSYCH! That wasn’t really *our *Earth, it just looked a lot like our Earth. :smack: Then in the finale they finally do find our Earth, but it’s not our future it’s our past! And that character over there? She’s actually an angel, and so are he and she over there, and… just don’t think too hard about any of it.
The Homecoming Saga*, it’s called. IIRC, one of the species is bat-like, having the ability to fly. The other is rat-like, living underground. And, yeah, that series really went south after a promising beginning.
When the first room is opened and the discoverer is asked if he sees anything he replies “Wonderful things!” Which is exactly what Howard Carter said of the stuff he saw in Tut’s tomb. And the picture of the woman wearing the “sacred artifacts” is a parody of a photo of Heinrich Schlieman’s wife, when she wore the jewelry taken from the site of Troy.