Or to extrapolate . . . there’s a well-known sci-fi story about some future beings discovering nothing about us, except a Mickey-Mouse watch. Very “outlandish conclusions.”
Another science fiction story where the only artifact that survives for thousands of years is the common porcelain toilet bowl.
They are found all over, in every archaeological dig, in nearly every house & business building. So the scientists conclude that these were probably an altar for the household gods.
One of the biggest mysteries of future is what happened to the SUV-culture. Their influence diminished unexplicably at the turn of millenium. The problem is we don’t even know what language the SUV-people spoke. Some connect the rise of SUV-people to the wide migrations of the Japanese - evidenced by thousands of Japanese cars found widespread over Europe and America as well as elsewhere. Other scientists argue the SUV-people were a different, much bigger race. Since their vehicle, so central to their culture, seem clumsy for pure transportation, ithey were either cult objects or signs of social prestige for chieftains.
That in the 1990s the Earth was overrun by an invasion of strange silvery disc-like creatures, led by the fanatical AOL tribe. After an epic struggle, they were defeated. Their discarded shells lie piled in huge waste heaps, each a testament to the accuracy of human marksmanship.
Slightly more seriously, future generations might look at the number of extictions and conclude there had been some sort of environmental catastrophe.
I cant imagine someone from the future being able to find and examine fossils from our age but also be completely ignorant of our technology and lifestyle. The befuddled future archaeologist is something of a silly caricature. Most likely a lot of this would be assumed. Not to mention, we’ve generated so much junk that all finds will be surrounded by our technology and other artifacts that will help solve all sorts of mysteries, the same way we examine the tools of icemen or fossilized humans.
In the distant future, aliens discover fossilized human remains from this era. With carbon dating, they determine a time that human teeth suddenly became straighter. (Not sure if they can tell they are also whiter from fossils)
Why would you assume those beings are able to deduce the answer? I think even with evidence from other surviving artifacts, the true reason would elude them.
Because they would see that this was a technologically advanced people and that teeth would have been manipulated via technology: dentistry, nutrition, cleaning, etc. The idea that they would assume we all lived and died in a pre-technological era, especially with the population numbers they’ll be able to figure out is silly.
Its an old sci-fi trope, and its silly. Future observers will have at least the sophistication of modern observers of the past. We don’t sit around and think “This iceman was found with various colorings on him. Why did evolution choose for these strange patterns?!?!” Err, we know its tattoos. Its not that hard to figure out.
I guess you could come up with a very foreign observer, like a non-carbon based life in the far future. Fine, but they might not even know what the hell teeth are or if what they are looking at was once alive. If we’re going to play this game, then if they’re already at the stage where they understand such things such as human, teeth, societies, etc then its not that large of a leap to understand technology, in fact, its probably impossible to know these things and not understand societies, culture, technology and how these things affect the fossil record. Humans are very obviously a tool-using species. Removing us from our tools is an unlikely conclusion a remotely competent archaeologist would make.
I think it’s far more likely that they’d look at all the dental work – huge numbers of fillings, bridges, and false teeth – and wonder what happened to our teeth to make them so awful in so short a time.
In Frederick Pohl’s second Heechee novel, Beyond the Blue Event Horizon, humans discover the artifacts of Heechee civilization, including huge numbers of Japanese-fan-shaped things that they couldn’t figure out a use for. They get called “prayer fans”, because it was assumed that they were religious articles.
They turn out to be books in recorded form.
All our CDs and DVDs will last a long time, and might persuade future alien archaeologists that we worshipped the bright and shiny multicolored discs. Or maybe we used them to locate the North Star.
I once heard Dr. Drew theorize that one day archaeologists might conclude that implants were part of some bizarre ritual, largely exclusive to rich women. Which it kind of is.
Only if they were idiots, or so lacking in magnification technology they couldn’t see the very regular patterns imprinted on the aluminum laminated between the plastic.
Also, there is likely nothing that would destroy all our cultures without destroying all our artifacts as well. Not even plague or massive economic collapse would get everyone, every single Westerner, worldwide.
You’d think that a poster whose username references probably the second-most influential Lovecraftian after old Howard himself would have a better imagination…
It’s not just the lack of “fun”. Citizen Derleth seems to think that figuring out what such recording discs are would be a slam-dunk. For anyone lacking similar technology as a clue, it wouldn’t. How long it would take to figure out is a good question, but I suspect it would take a while until someone had the flash of genius to unravel the mystery. That, pretty much, was Pohl’s point in BTBEH. if you want a current example, consider Birdstones and Bannerstones. Their real use is still uncertain*, and one of the big “explanations” was that they were religious or fetish items:
I think an excellent case can be made that they’re essentially handles for atlatls, but that topic would take us too far afield.
I think that more than enough artefacts will survive / fossilise for them to piece together a very accurate picture of how we lived. We’re incredibly messy.
In fact, if they’re technologically more advanced than us, they’ll probably know more about our era than we do. There are bound to be “unknown unknowns” in our world.
But those patterns degrade over time-- a short time, a matter of years. What kind of patterns would be left after, say, 10,000 years, let alone 100,000 or a million?
Maybe I’m biased from the recent wave of"World without humans" documentaries running on the Discovery Channel and other networks, but one point many folks seem to make is that most of what we consider enduring really isn’t once its opened up to the corrosive mix of time and the elements. Many materials degrade more quickly than we generally assume, even the stuff we don’t expect to, like plastics.
Fossilized bones survive. Stone survives. Plastics can’t. Metal can survive, but only over civilizational periods (10,000 years), over periods of fossilization, probably not.
That said, the stuff that will survive for future archaeolgists are things that aren’t here at home: satellites in orbits high enough to avoid degradation and reentry, and possibly lunar probes. Any traces of human technology on Earth could be long gone, but Richard Nixon’s name on the Apollo landers could last forever.
My ex and I joked one time that future archaeologists would find fossils of various dog breeds and wonder what the hell kind of of environmental pressures could exist that would transform wolves into… the mutants you see today. Tea cup/purse dogs dug up in digs around Southern California, the occasional giant skeleton of a Great Dane found and mused about.
