Do you think it would be possible that there have existed complex, intelligent civilizations way before humans?

Yes.

Yes.

We're still here.

signed, Eukaryotes

Yes, I often wonder if this isn't the first time a human like species has evolved here on earth. Considering the earth is 4 billion years old we know so little about it's history. So much lies hidden beneath the oceans and ice 🤔

Yes in the previous 4.5 billion years a few non human advanced civilizations probably rose and fell on this planet.

It's also a way to explain strange phenomenon. Instead of UFOs coming from others worlds might they be an echo of some previous advanced civilization on earth?

There was an episode of Star ⭐️ Trek - Voyager when the crew figures out that some 🦕 type alien 👽 evolved on earth millions of years before humans emerged and developed space travel and left earth 🌍 and colonized another planet millions of years ago.

Voyager was generally a LAME show but this episode was excellent.

I think it’s the height of conceit that humans think they’re the only intelligent beings to have ever existed in the universe.

Will some future Charlton Heston discover this?

No.

While the earth is billions of years old (sorry not sorry fundies), we'd have to accept that there'd have to have been an entire cycle of evolution before us or that this so-called advanced civilization either co-existed with dinosaurs or slipped in after dinosaurs and before us.

There simply hasn't been enough time for the entire process to have occurred twice.

^ You have to think back farther than a million years

^^^your statement is nonsensical as my entire point is that you'd have to go back so far that it's no longer reasonable given the time frames.

^^^^ What does that even mean?

It was an old civilization filled with Datalounger types.

Way down below the ocean

I want to see you

Where I wanna be, she may be

My antediluvian baby.

No, that's heaven, R13.

I think it's possible. Humans have been here for 250,000 years but we only have recorded history for around 10,000, so the majority of human history is unknown. On top of that, the Earth has been here for 4.5bn years, which is more than enough time for multiple intelligent species to evolve and become extinct.

We have documentation (in the form of fossils) of life forms going back billions of years. Both soft tissue and bones have left traces. If any of those life forms had participated in an advanced civilization we'd have found durable artifacts (e.g. of carved stone, gold, bone, horn, etc.) associated with the fossils. We have dinosaur tracks, so we could have traces of roads. So if there had been advanced civilizations on earth before ours, they were those of animals we haven't discovered yet—given that scientists have excavated all over the world in numerous strata, that seems unlikely.

Maybe those advanced civilizations didn’t think that planet earth was worth investigating, R17.

@r17, Except under oceans and what's under all that ice? So much we don't know yet

R18, the question OP posed is about advanced civilizations arising ON EARTH sometime in the billions of years before human civilization.

I think human beings were left here as some kind of experiment. And I believe it happened less than 1 million yeas ago. I don't think the crowd who believes the Ancient Aliens stuff is as crazy as they appear to be.

[quote]^^^^ What does that even mean?

FFS

If an advanced civilization existed before homo sapiens, it would have to predate the entire current evolutionary track that produced the oldest common ancestor for all living species - a 555 Million-Year-Old Worm-Like Creature.

Otherwise, two parallel evolutionary tracks would have to have been occurring at the same time - the one that produced us and the one that produced them.

Or, you'd have to believe that some advanced civilization was living and had pet dinosaurs.

So, if there were an advanced civilization before us, there would have to have been sufficient time for an entire evolutionary cycle that produced them, then an entire reset of life on the planet where everything was wiped out, then started again.

Isn't Atlantis supposed to be just that? An ancient civilization predating our own human history?

[quote]Isn't Atlantis supposed to be just that? An ancient civilization predating our own human history?

Well, setting aside that Atlantis is not real...

Atlantis was still humans, advanced, but still a human civilization. The premise of that argument focuses on whether an advanced non-human civilization existed on earth prior to humans.

@r22

Here's the paper that this thread is about. It addresses a lot of your points to make their case. It's pretty dry reading, but makes a lot of interesting arguments

How about the entire Universe, OP ?

Much better chance intelligent beings evolved somewhere else than just this planet.

^ That's not the point of the article or this thread. It's to explore the possibility of an advanced civilization on earth before man came along

Agree with the idea that if there had been a civilization of sentients there would be some echo of it, and there isn’t.

Couldn't it be long before dinosaurs, R9? (And even before the species that were before the dinosaurs).

I think we might be the result of an advanced civilization on another planet. They came here, we evolved, and they left, and our ancient civilizations reference it with all the fascination with the universe and the stars and stories about fire in the sky and people rising up into the heavens or coming down to impregnate, taking the form of swans and WTF were angels? Right?

Stop bashing eldergays!

Maybe, but if there were, they fucked it all up too, because, WHET?

[quote]Couldn't it be long before dinosaurs, [R9]? (And even before the species that were before the dinosaurs).

Yes. But, in order for that to be true, an entire evolutionary cycle of would have to have occurred ending with a complete reset of life on the planet.

As I suggested in r22: "If an advanced civilization existed before homo sapiens, it would have to predate the entire current evolutionary track that produced the oldest common ancestor for all living species - a 555 Million-Year-Old Worm-Like Creature...So, if there were an advanced civilization before us, there would have to have been sufficient time for an entire evolutionary cycle that produced them, then an entire reset of life on the planet where everything was wiped out, then started again."

^ I gave you the link to the paper this article is based on, but instead of reading it, you decided it's just easier for you to insist you're right, huh? I'm embarrassed for you

Deep Thoughts, by...

Cultural bias will be a problem here.I think it is possible that humans developed a complex intelligent civilization that we don't recognize as such. An ancient civilization which didn't leave the acutriments of what we today consider signs of said civilization. For us today we would have to have lewis leaky's wife find a fossilized i phone like device petrified. A petrified hypersonic weapon. We would say wow here's the evidence they were really advanced. I believe with aspiration as evidence It is Likely and possible an advanced civilization existed but we don't recognize their form of advancement. Maybe they worked 10 minutes a day. Had a farming and social system that ran on default faultlessly and perpetually arrived at by thought and experimentation. They reached a point in which they and ate and had sex for rest of the day.

This is some fascinating stuff about an advanced society right here in central US

"Cahokia was the largest and most influential urban settlement of the Mississippian culture, which developed advanced societies across much of what is now the central and southeastern United States, beginning more than 1,000 years before European contact."

Real Cavewives of the Paleozoic Era.

They couldn't stop you showing tits. Maybe dick, too.

How is it that so many of the posters on this thread are missing the basic topic of the thread? OP is asking about civilizations on earth before humans evolved. Not about ancient human civilizations; not about extraterrestrial civilizations: civilizations of pre-human species on earth.

[quote]^ I gave you the link to the paper this article is based on, but instead of reading it, you decided it's just easier for you to insist you're right, huh? I'm embarrassed for you

I read the article.

It does not, in fact, address my points. It addresses many other points. Only your incomplete and erroneous reading of the article would draw the conclusion that it addressed my points.

r39, civilizations like dinosaurs, then? That sort of complex and intelligent?

To the poster talking about the first worms being 555 million years ago being the be all and end all to the discussion...that leaves 4 billion more years. We assume there were huge swaths of time where evolution just kind of paused and was static for a billion or two billion years. The oceanic earth era. Maybe it wasn't as oceanic as we think for all those billions of years. Even using geological time, there is only so much we can look at all over the world because of the tectonic turnover and erosion that would take place over those types of time scales.

[quote] The oceanic earth era. Maybe it wasn't as oceanic as we think for all those billions of years.

Even if it was, advanced societies can be underwater.

Yes. Megalithic structures, particularly at Gobekli Tepe, suggest this, as do universal myths/histories.

There is no reason actually to doubt that human-like beings and civilizations pre-dated the dinosaur era. The Earth is immensely old and constantly changing, in geology, climate, flora, fauna, sea levels, etc.

R24 thinks he's smarter than Plato.

R39, Homo sapiens sapiens is accepted today as a descendant of ancient hominids. But what if a hominid more advanced existed in ante-deluvian times?

Any survivors would be back to Square One of knowledge, skills, language even.

Plato was writing allegorical fiction (through his characters) in the Timaeus and Critias; he wasn't reporting what he considered to be history. The story of Atlantis might be vaguely based on some actual tsunami or other disaster, but it wasn't intended to be taken literally.

[quote][R39], Homo sapiens sapiens is accepted today as a descendant of ancient hominids. But what if a hominid more advanced existed in ante-deluvian times?

Is Bishop Usher posting here?

How old are those cave paintings in Belgium, or France or WTF ever? No, I'm not googling it.

Don't we share something like 95% of our DNA with Chimpanzees? So IMO I think it's safe to say we evolved from them or some other species of apes or monkeys. We are the smarter version of them.

What has that got to do with the topic, R49?

Please read R39.

My personal belief is that human life here on earth is a study of the affect of time on a species given the fact that time only exists in our minds and at some point becomes absolutely incomprehensible for us to fathom. We are the creation of another for of human life that was spliced together through the study of the animals that were already here and what it takes to live in earth's climate - monkeys being what we are based off of.

Considering that everything actually exists all at once, yet we are experiencing it linearly, lends itself to this theory. It's a study of Time and Space. Anything that reaches the limits of our ability to comprehend it (there can be a million atoms in the head of a straight pin, yet a million earths could fit into a planet out somewhere in the galaxy). It's impossible for our brains to make sense of that for a reason / nano seconds to a trillion years. And for all of our efforts over these 250k years, we still have no idea where we came from before we were born, and what happens to us after, and we probably never will. Our understanding of some of the most basic elements of our being are confined. And I believe it is by design.

R50, I honestly think a lot of the disconnect on this thread is due to the inability people have to understand the timescales we are discussing. For example, they think about dinosaurs and picture the epitome of something that is ancient. Dinosaurs only existed from about 245 to 65 million years ago. That is out of the 4.5 billion year history of the planet. That makes them, in a timeline, only showing up in the last 6% of the time earth has existed. Ninety four percent of the earth's history was pre-dinosaur.

Here's a short video about what will happen to every remnant of current human existence once we disappear. Within 500 million years, there is no trace we ever existed. So, say, two million years from now, on DL 2.0, some giant cockroach like creature that has evolved to take over the world will be typing with its various appendages and wondering if there was any other intelligent species before its existence.

No, if we're finding evidence of fossils of sub human species and fossil from the Dinosaurs, we'd have evidence of other intelligent life. The earth could not have sustained other Humans, earlier than that. It was too unstable. It is an interesting theory though.

Interesting, R51.

R53 the person said complex intelligent civilizations, no one said it had to be human.

R53, again, you are not comprehending the time scales. Here's a picture of humans from 500 million years ago...

[quote]To the poster talking about the first worms being 555 million years ago being the be all and end all to the discussion...that leaves 4 billion more years. We assume there were huge swaths of time where evolution just kind of paused and was static for a billion or two billion years. The oceanic earth era. Maybe it wasn't as oceanic as we think for all those billions of years. Even using geological time, there is only so much we can look at all over the world because of the tectonic turnover and erosion that would take place over those types of time scales.

smh

Liquid water. Oxygen. Life as we know it could not exist without soluble bioactive elements, liquid water, and an energy source. The limiting factor would be when did liquid water become available. So, it does not leave 4 bilion years.

As for the 555 million years ago common ancestor, the point is that you either have to believe that this non homo sapiens advanced civilization evolved along side us within the past 555 million years and left no trace or believe that life emerged previously, evolved into an advanced civilization, then life was wiped out and got reset to start all over again with the process that led to us.

The latter doesn't seem to have enough time given the two constraints of the appearance of liquid water and how long evolution takes. The former would suggest that this advanced cvilization suffered some global apocalypse that wiped them all out, but left other lifeforms to continue. Essentially, we are the equivalent of descendants of their cockroaches.

R53, also, the very instability you are talking about means we don't know what existed. There are huge parts of the earth's history that are basically empty space where we just currently believe everything just kind of sat there waiting life's formation. I'm talking about 80-90% of the earth's history. Empty oceans. Lots of volcanoes. That's pretty much all we've got because there isn't even much of a geologic record due to the turnover of the earth's surface on the time scales we are talking about.

[quote]Yes. But, in order for that to be true, an entire evolutionary cycle of would have to have occurred ending with a complete reset of life on the planet.

I don’t think this logic holds up. You seem to be suggesting that there’s an official cycle to civilization and that humanity’s development is the one and only way for sentience plus social order and organization to develop.

Theoretically it can happen at any time. It only took 85 million years for the little shrewlike mammals that were the first primates to lead to human evolution. That could have occurred countless times. And even then, who is to say it needs even that much time?

We don’t know anything about brain function of extinct animals. Look at grey parrots and octopuses. They’re both extremely intelligent but you wouldn’t know that just by looking at their fossil remains.

By the way I don’t think there has been a civilization before humans, at least as we would understand it, but I only think that because I suspect we would see some faint echo of it and we don’t.

Someone here doesn't understand that evolution is NOT linear. When a species dies out we don't start back at square one. It's the same reason monkeys exist alongside humans. We didn't replace monkeys, we evolved from them. I'm tired of this person's inability to see past their nose

You all take it from here 😒

R57, there's been water on Earth for about 4.6 billion years.

r59 - I concede the point that it's possible for sentience to evolve that is not consistent with how we evolved. But, while anything is possible, we only have one model on which to base our conclusions.

[quote]By the way I don’t think there has been a civilization before humans, at least as we would understand it, but I only think that because I suspect we would see some faint echo of it and we don’t.

I actually do not believe that the lack of evidence itself negates it - that's a logical fallacy. Just because we don't have evidence, doesn't mean anything in an of itself.

Something to consider when questioning other life in the universe. By the time their signals reach us, will they still exist.

I think it would be fascinating to find out the human story isn't one of evolution but closer to a creation story. Not by some godlike figure but by another civilization from somewhere else in the universe as suggested in r51. There are animals on this planet who have been here much longer than human life but are exactly pretty much what they were from the beginning with little signs of evolution. How is it that humans evolved so quickly to exactly what we are today? There are no other animals, even within our own Hominidae family, that even approach what we have become. We must have either been given an extreme leg-up by something or just simply put here by something. And don't tell me other animals are just as intelligent. No other animals are sitting at home jacking off to versions of themselves over anything that closely resembles the internet.

[quote][R57], there's been water on Earth for about 4.6 billion years.

Ths issue is stable water.

R60, someone seems to not understand that we aren't talking about evolving. We are talking about total, planetary-wide destruction and the wiping of all evidence of existence from the face of the Earth...then life begins again. With the time scales we are talking about, that could have happened a couple of times in Earth's history.

And, here's a link to an article about the early water on Earth.

[quote]Someone here doesn't understand that evolution is NOT linear. When a species dies out we don't start back at square one. It's the same reason monkeys exist alongside humans. We didn't replace monkeys, we evolved from them. I'm tired of this person's inability to see past their nose

LOL - that, of course, is not even remotely what the argument is.

But, thanks for playing. Johnny, tell r60 what he's won.

R64, humans evolved so much because of one thing (at least this is the theory right now)...fire. Fire allowed us to cook our food. That allowed us to release levels of nutrients unheard of by any other species. That lead to the huge growth of the human brain. That huge brain lead to everything else. It was an accident of nature that we evolved at all just because Kronk on the praire decided to stick his bloody bison burger in the nearest lightning created fire remnant.

R65, the oceans filled 4 billion years ago.

Here's a link to a lot of little tidbits (and some cool videos) about geologic time and life for those here who want a quickie...

I've always imagined that the earth itself, the physical planet, evolved through series of collisions while hurtling through space, objects colliding and some kind of fusion. Eventually these became large enough to form a sphere that began to orbit the sun, which was the star with enough "pull" to achieve it. As time passed, the minerals, and substances began to develop life forms, bacterial, at first and these grew. Yes of course water too. But the water was the chemical result of various elements fusing together under just the right temperatures gasses, etc. Volcanoes enlarging and re-forming the earth as we evolved. We humans are part of the evolutionary process. And I'm sure other life forms are continuing to evolve and form here and elsewhere. Of course we have fucked up the environment to become a very disruptive force in the evolutionary process. I think in future, we are going to be terraforming other planets and moons because earth will not be able to sustain life. Other planets in our solar system are at various stages of evolutionary development. Most will probably never develop life forms because they lack the right balance of various elements to create it.

[quote]I actually do not believe that the lack of evidence itself negates it - that's a logical fallacy. Just because we don't have evidence, doesn't mean anything in an of itself.

I said “I think we would see evidence”. I didn’t just say “we don’t see evidence so it doesn’t exist.” Read more carefully.

Interesting theory about human life on Earth.

But doesn't preclude OP's theory about even earlier life.

The Sphinx and the Lost City of Atlantis prove that an intelligent civilization existed millions of years ago.

r67, It's impossible to have a meaningful discussion with someone who talks out of both sides of their ass, but thanks for playing 🤪

Ugg ugg says the neanderthal.

C'mon you guys. This is actually an interesting thread. Please don't spoil it with personal squabbles.

But we're they cut, or uncut?

The species that existed before humans created some sort of civilization system and it would be totally different from what humans would create.

Yes. They were an advanced civilization with cars, dishwashers that were baby wooly mammoths, record players that were live bird beaks on spinning stone discs that would occasionally squawk, "Eh, it's a living", and pterodactyl airlines.

I find it fascinating that we know more about the universe above us than what's under our own feet. I can only imagine what secrets lie at the bottom of the oceans

Sediment.

^ You have a fascinating imagination 🙄

Facts are boring to stupid people.

^ What "facts" would those be?

^^^sediment

this is interesting.....

[quote]I said “I think we would see evidence”. I didn’t just say “we don’t see evidence so it doesn’t exist.” Read more carefully.

Rude dumbass is what I get for engaging. I actually conceded a point after reading your rebuttal "more carefully."

You, in fact, did say "but I only think that because I suspect we would see some faint echo of it and we don't" - affirming that the lack of evidence supports your belief that no previous civilization existed.

Careful enough for you?

The dinosaurs ate the ancient race and stomped their cities to dust.

R47, Don't be so sure. Where is the allegory in Plato's location of Atlantis?

We're not talking the Slough of Despond here.

[quote]Where is the allegory in Plato's location of Atlantis?

R90, where is the allegory in the supposed location of Sodom and Gomorrah?

There wasn't one. One was a great emptiness beyond the Rock of Gibraltar, and the other was a desolation with salt formations. The locations were beside the point; the subject of the allegory lay elsewhere.

[quote]Della

CUNT

Of course it's possible. Maybe not on Earth, but somewhere.

[quote] Considering that any traces of a civilization would exist for only 4 million years at the most,

I haven’t read the entire thread so maybe this has been mentioned already, but the above quote is incorrect.

Assuming an advanced civilization mastered nuclear fission there would still be traces of decaying isotopes that we could detect and which do not occur in nature.

No.

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