(Very) Ancient Civilizations

Great Debates
1

Inspired by the thread on ancient nuclear wars.

So, we often say that human-level intelligence has evolved only once in the history of our world. My question is, how do we know that? Let’s say that velociraptors (or wooly mammoths, or dimetrodons) were super-smart and evolved some technology. They lived in mud huts, used tools, even wrote stuff on stone tablets and wore top hats and monocles. Would we have any way what so ever to know about that? I mean, you’d expect a few mud huts to fossilize, but we know that dinosaurs made nests, and didn’t find that out until 1970. Or maybe they built their huts out of leaves and sticks, so they wouldn’t fossilize as easily. Obviously, it’s not particularly likely. But can we really say for sure* that no other species has ever been intelligent, ever?

*I’m not using “sure” in the conspiracy theory sense of, “Well, you’re 99.99% certain, but that’s not good enough!”.

2

Occam’s Razor. Don’t postulate entities without need. So far, we’ve not seen any evidence that would require us to posit the existence of human-level intelligence prior to the evolution of modern humans.

3

What would be the bare minimum for “civilization” ? Permanent territory? Metal working? Writing? Let’s set some parameters, here.

4

No, not even remotely sure. All we can do is look at the relative intelligence of the organisms alive any any point in time, and extrapolate that based on how we think evolution works.

The obvious flaw with this is that humans aren’t remarkably different physiologically from chimps and we diverged from them just a few years ago. So if we applied the standard to the modern world that we apply to past eras, we would conclude that there is no intelligent life. The problem is that in term so intelligent life we only have a single sample. From that sample we know that a species can advance in intelligence incredibly rapidly once it starts down that path, but we can’t know whether that is the norm or an exception.

You wouldn’t though. Fossilisation is an *incredibly *rare event. Fossilisation of material like huts that would only have meaning if they were preserved intact is so rare that we can consider it never happens.

To put this into perspective, forests of some form have covered most of the Earth’s land surface almost continually for the past for the past 300 million years or so. The number of fossilized forests worldwide is about 20 and the whole lot would fit into a square about 10km on a side. Tyrannosuarus rex roamed over huge areas of the planet for over 3 million years. The total number of intact T. rex fossils is about 5. And the chances of a forest or a skeleton getting covered in mud while still intact is comparatively high. They are robust materials that don’t break down readily in water and can be moved in a flood without being smashed to pieces.

In contrast, a mud or wood hut has approximately no chance of ever being fossilised. As soon as flood water hits a hut, it will be smashed to pieces so it can never be swept into a location where it can be fossilised. Even if the structure were built on a flood plain, they will only be temporarily covered in water and can’t fossilise. The only possible chance they have is if they are built behind a natural levee of some sort so that they are rapidly covered with water that does not recede for at least a few thousand years. That by itself is incredibly improbable. But even if a mud hut does get covered in this manner, it you now have mud covered with mud. The hut will begin to dissolve and very rapidly the boundary between the structure and the lake floor will vanish, destroying the fossil.

Even if a species existed for a million years, I would rate the chance of a single simple structure being fossilised at about the same as the chance of being kicked to death by a duck.

A mound nest is much more robust and much more easily fossilised than a hollow mud structure. But as you note, even there we only have a handful of specimens despite the fact that hundreds of millions of them were constructed every year across the entire planet for over 100 million years. If a population of dinos were building their structures over an area just the size of Africa for only 4 million years, we would never expect to find any evidence.

Even if humans vanished today, the odds of any obvious signs of intelligence being found in 100 million years time would be remote. We just haven’t made a big enough impact for a long enough time for anything to have a chance of surviving.

5

The flag on the moon would sure throw some people for a loop, though.

6

Don’t assume that evolution is an ever upward line. Yes, it’s possible that there were intelligent races that eventually disappeared, one way or another.

7

If they were at the level we were at 30,000 years ago, spread so thin with only stone, wood, and bone as tools, it’d be unlikely anything could be found. Stephen Baxter speculates on your proposal in his novel Evolution. If they were on the level of the Romans, I think it’d be easier to find, but still not likely. Remember, entire species emerge, live millenia, and go into the darkness leaving no trace for us to find. Most of them actually. We’ll only know a small part of the planets biological history, either the most common and successful, or the most lucky. If you’re talking 1960s level though…

We would see resources depleted in places they should naturally appear, only to show up in very high concentrations totally out of place elsewhere. We would see the same with animal fossils if this hypothetical species had oceangoing vessals. Our radioactives will survive a long time. We’re making tons of elements not produced since the creation of the universe itself, some with half-lives rated in billions of years or more. These would be signs of an intelligent race.

So would minor traces of pollution, found crushed into the geological strata, mud cores, or recorded in any remaining ice layers (although that’s unlikely, as earths natural state is ice free and has been for the vast majority of its history and will be again). We would be able to see the obvious pollution, telltale sign of a species with industrial capability. Also, it’s possible some creations would survive preserved on the ocean floor, or buried by the earth, only to pop up on the surface from time to time as erosion and continental drift do their work. These may continue to the end of the earth (there are 3By/o+ rocks on the surface of the earth now), and if when the sun dies and the planet is thrown into interstellar space, some of our work may be preserved on the surface forever, as the earth cools to essentially no geological activity and with minimal if any bombardment from thw space in between the stars. We’ve already observed such rogue worlds.

Our probes to other planets and moons would be long gone eroded away, but our probes, footsteps, and remnants on our moon should survive somewhat
intact until the death of the sun. We have pictures of our footprints on the moon, so if anyone else made it that far they’d have to be damn small not to be seen. Probes that exit our solar system could last into the tens of billions of years or further, but even if they do survive to be a last trace, it is a trace less than a molecule of water in an ocean the size of our solar system. Humans have already made a mark on the universe that, small though it may be, should persevere to become older than the universe itself now is.

My question is, humans of all kinds made billions of stone tools everywhere they went. Will they all erode? If we treated them as fossils, would none make it into the record? All it would take is a small community living on the edge of a lake for thousands of years, throwing their tools into the lake, right? I figure these stones exist in numbers larger than some dinosaur species we’ve found. Would I be wrong in that assumption? Or in the assumption they’d make it into the record easier than bone? Because if I’m right in that, it might not be too arrogant to dismiss past species making it to that level.

8

Great analysis, Darth Ayebaw.
Thanks for making my post redundant.

It might be impossible to determine if some other prior species ever made it to the hunter/gatherer stage.
But once they get to the ‘top hat and monocle’ stage, the resultant artifacts would be hard to miss.

9

If there was another group of intelligent tool users there’s a good chance we would have already found some evidence. Stone tools last a long long time. Stone tools made by human ancestors have been found dating back nearly 2.5 million years and there’s some evidence of fossilized bones with tool marks on them from more than 3 million years in the past. If someone found evidence of stone tools from 60 million years in the past it would be a very big deal.

10

Easily disproved by the fact that wooden huts are found preserved in conditions that, while not long enough for fossilization, certainly are conducive to it. Ozette comes to mind.

11

Post-holes would (and do) survive a long, long time. Stone tools effectively last forever. We know that from the archaeology of our own species. I see no reason why stone tools made by dinosaurs or whatever could not survive to be discovered.

Our own civilization will be obvious millions of years after we are gone, perhaps tens or hundreds of millions of years. Why? Well, to give an example, I was driving on highway 11 from Barrie, Ontario to North Bay - which goes through the Canadian Shield. This is a geological formation of solid bedrock that survived numerous ice ages. The highway is often cut straight through outcroppings of the solid bedrock in a perfectly straight line, for hundreds of miles. While the highway itself will go in a few years if not maintained, the rock cutting it runs trough will not.

There are numerous places where humans have drilled or blasted through solid rock like that, all over the world. While no doubt many of these will be eroded by glaciers, destroyed by volcanic eruptions, etc., I find it very hard to believe that they all will. Finding even one such cutting, pit, or tunnel would be absolutely conclusive proof of a higher civilization, since a perfectly straight cutting cannot possibly be natural and canada shield rock at least is so very hard that technologically primitive persons could not possibly have cut it large-scale.

12

It seems to me that the shape of the dinosaurs’ hands wouldn’t have been conducive to any sort of tool work. It’s conclusive that dinosaurs generally had talons with no opposable thumbs, right? I’m not saying that they couldn’t have been intelligent to some degree, but building and working with tools would require a certain degree of dexterity that the dinos just couldn’t have possessed.

It’s a great thought, though, isn’t it? Reminds me of those Dinotopia books I used to read when I was a kid.

13

A non-tool using intelligent species (like dolphins or whales, for example) aren’t going to leave much evidence of their intelligence behind.

At least, not until they are moving megaliths through sheer psychokinesis.

Edit: Sorry. I confused “culture” with “civilization”.

14

There’s a sci-fi novel based on the premise that the K-T boundary iridium is the result of a civilization-ending war between intelligent dinosaurs. I remember quite enjoying it, but can’t think of the author’s name.

15

As suggested, one requirement for an ancient civilization to be undetectable today would be that they never made real use of stone for tools, nor modified it for buildings. We know that fossils can persist for hundreds of millions of years, so it would be unreasonable to assume that buried stone items could not.

Since the one species we know to be capable of civilization building made early and extensive use of stone, it looks like a serious reach to believe there were others that never did.

16

You could say the exact same thing about mammals. I mean, there’s one exception, but with thousands of thousands of species, that’s hardly statistically significant.

17

So it’s possible (though obviously unlikely and unprovable) that there every few million years, a new species reaches the stone age, then disappears… That’s pretty cool!

I don’t know if stone tools would necessarily last millions of years. I mean, rocks get grind down to sand, sand deposits underwater, and forms back into rocks, right? Or volcanic rocks are melt down by lava, etc. As an example, we suspect that dinosaurs used gizzard stones, yet we don’t actually have real proof/consensus on that point. So if gizzard stones don’t preserve well, why would tools? If the tool-using species wasn’t as widespread as we were (IE, every freaking where) there’s no reason to believe we would have found any tools.

And if I were to find what looks a lot like an arrowhead that’s eroded for fifty million years and brought it to a scientist, odds are he’d say it’s just a rock from fifty million years ago that happens to look like a very eroded arrowhead. Not to mention that ancient creatures could have made tools that we wouldn’t necessarily recognize as such; after all, they’d have totally different needs, abilities, etc.

18

How long they would last depends on their circumstances. Dropped in a fast-flowing stream bed, they might be unrecognizable in weeks. Buried in the earth, they could easily last as long as fossilized bones (which are often not as durable as the rock from which projectile points are made).

It may not be possible to date a rock that’s been removed from its context. And the arrowhead was almost certainly made long after the rock was formed.

You’d be looking for consistent shapes that don’t occur naturally.

19

Bolding mine.

This is really important. We know that in our one certain instance of intelligent life, ourselves, that our biology has necessitated certain advancements in technology to help deal with natural problems. A being that is better adapted, or less widespread would likely leave little to know traces of their existence, even if they possessed a significantly advanced culture. Consider perhaps, the needs of a nomadic group of (mostly) carnivorous raptor type dinosaurs. They would follow the herds of prey animals, have little need for tools or fire for cooking or warmth so long as they kept to warmer climates. We know they had sharp eyesight and probably saw well in the dark, so there would be no need for fire to keep the ghoulies at bay. None of that would preclude them from having a language, culture, social customs and an “oral history”. They are simply better adapted to their environment than the tool-using humans that change the environment to suit us.

20

I think a compelling argument could be made that this is a correct conclusion.