Discovery of 3M-year-old stone tools sparks prehistoric whodunnit
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
I imagine it would be extremely difficult to know or even detect any non industrial civilization with much confidence that long ago.
For such a civilization to develop and go unnoticed to historians, their influence must have been very small, they must have been geographically limited. For instance maybe they lived in low-lands and rising sea levels erased all trace, but this would still require that their artifacts rarely if ever got carried up hills where they might have been untouched by the rising oceans. It seems deeply implausible.
Certainly there was nothing even remotely like our civilization in the past. There are glass beer bottles laying around on virtually every corner of the planet, on mountain tops, in caves, in landfills. Just everywhere really. It will take longer than a mere few million years to erase all these.
Anything on the oceanic crust will get recycled in short order, think hundreds of millions of years at most. On continental crust it is far, far more complicated. There are areas we call 'shields' that are over 3 billion years old and are the original cratons that seeded continent formation. Now, they've tended to be scraped clean by glaciers and other processes over time, but not all is recycled.
But while direct evidence is somewhat easy to erase, indirect evidence is very, very hard to erase. The banded iron formations are an indirect sign of life in the oceans at the time and cover massive areas with varying chemical compositions. The same is true for the for the anthropocene. The chemicals we've released in to the air, water, and ground will leave fingerprints for hundreds of millions of years on this planet as they fossilize into rocks and get pushed into mountains.
We could put a bound on this. ~90% of oil deposits come from the Mesozoic or later. So the latest we could see a society show up, use up the easily accessible oil/other fossil fuels, collapse (presumably from energy crisis), and still have the fossil fuels we see today would be the late Paleozoic or possibly the early Mesozoic before it's fossil fuels have formed (~250 million years ago).
People have known about radio dating using different isotopes and it always shocked me that the first time someone radiodated crude oil was in the mid 00s just 15 or so years ago. I don't remember the technology the Canadians used it wasn't C14 as that tops out around 100K or so years.
The more you learn the more you find stuff everyone thinks they know, but they don't actually know it, or we just figured it out shockingly recently. Like we've been pumping oil how long, and doing radiodating how long, but nobody never put two and two together until just 15 years ago? That's just wild. You'd assume every field has a birthdate but reality is nobody knows for sure. Except that one field in Alberta as of 15 years ago. Maybe more data available now, donno.
Its just funny that journalist types will cite each other as if they're primary sources for decades until a number like "a quarter billion yrs" is culturally engrained into our civilization, then someone does some actual real world test tube work ONE time in ONE place and get different results.
For a multi trillion dollar business, its not as completely scientifically researched as people would assume. If it doesn't result in more flow at the pump, it doesn't get researched, mostly.
I would imagine if someone wanted to seriously pursue the theory (if they'd be permitted to do so, probably not) the way I'd do it is find "disappointing fields" and look for peculiar correlations between them WRT odd permeability test results. So is that field disappointing because its permeability is really low (frac it!) or is it disappointing because all the geology points to a good salt dome and the permeability is great but there's nothing there? The old fashioned way to explain fields that look good but don't produce is the permeability is so high it all leaked out millennia ago (among other explanations boiling down to "we don't know").
I would think you'd find weirder evidence of tailings piles around solid mines and a lack of open pit mines. That would be easier to find than an oil well. Also I expect there would be really weird patterns in sediment related to mercury and similar waste products. "They" never did leaded gas if there's no lead layer in the sediment, etc.
Some of it is sophistry. No civilization beyond monkey tribes could possibly exist 3M years ago because there would be nuclear reactors and space ships laying around everywhere, as though there's no intermediate step between monkey tribes and nuclear reactors. Well, what if they never advanced beyond (fill in the blank with some group that's not very advanced in 2023)? Still centuries beyond a tribe of monkeys, yet culturally interesting none the less. We could detect the industrial revolution from England if it happened in Italy 2000 years previous. But... could we detect the Roman Empire if it happened before in Australia in 4000 BC? or 3M BC? I don't know about that, kind of an open question. If the Roman Empire or similar happened in the USA upper midwest before the mile tall ice sheets scrubbed everything, could we tell today? My educated guess is "no" we could not. It would still be culturally interesting even if no nuclear reactors and space ships were built here 50K years ago. I think it quite likely that bioidentical humans were up to all kinds of nonsense in prehistory that we've never discovered or never could discover. They were as smart as us, and healthier than us, until agriculture was invented.
Or we followed shoals of fish like herds? Avatar like? :-)
Thus they were as ONE!
the Silourians first depleted fossil fuels in the first hundred years of their energy technology journey
they subsequently realized the folly of this after they pretty much made the planet uninhabitable for them
they injected back into the ground biologically produced synthetic substitutes using organically captured solar energy
this large scale carbon-capture project, being entirely organic and sustainable has left no trace
Suppose there were some extremely stable and energetic combination of elements that was really easy to burn etc. we’d use it, but it’s extremely rare on earth. What if that is the result of the Silurians burning it all up 300m years ago or whatever - it’s rare because it’s been depleted already, leaving only the worthless and difficult to extract fossil fuels that we were forced to use.
This sort of discussion isn’t disimilar to SETI stuff - we look for water rich planets in the habitable zone because that’s what we grew up on - in reality we could be abnormal or rare-ish and has giant life or stuff living on Venus analogues could be the norm. We’re trying to make assertions from a point of informed ignorance - which is still ignorant.
That's the hard question you're going to have to work around. Humans cannot 'use up' 100% of the oil/carbon resources on earth. It is energetically impossible for that to happen without turning over a significant portion of the Earths crust. There are always going to be signed of carbon concentrating processes on Earth, at least until our crust is completely remelted. This miracle energy source doesn't seem to exist anywhere now which would defy explanation.
People who can’t envision the above or the multitude of other ways to get to electricity without it being transpiration focused lack imagination.
Describe me a basic evolutionary path that leads to this even if it’s not the path of least resistance.
I’m really not biased at all, there is a difference between being open minded and just not taking into account basic factors for the sake of pretending to be one.
Any civilization will discover fire first, fire is easy and is needed to bootstrap any technological civilization.
I felt a sense of awe when I realized just how much trial and error must have went into learning how to make such tools. With how many cuts and bruises we inflicted on ourselves, I came to view the technology as something invaluable and precious. We had the benefit of washing our hands, who knows just how many of our pioneering ancestors had gotten an infection and died while trying to make a better cutting tool - or lost an eye from a rock chip? And these folks may well have been “the crazy ones” or the more intelligent members of the tribe.
I could easily see how countless generations would wind up making the same tools with the same process. If you asked me how to make more ‘advanced’ hand axes I’d struggle to come up with something better.
You're right about the wheel though, I saw a facinating video on the properties of the new martian rover's wheels.
What if the gods are just that advanced civilisation, who built humanity and then left, millions of years ago. and somehow our global consciousness has been able to recall our origins still to these days.
Maybe everyone just makes same kinda stuff up to justify existance, I dunno. Seems weird cultures can vary so much on everything, and yet religion and spirituality have so much commonalities on the foundations
Most of the world was explored by Christian missionaries like Jesuits, who also educated the informants who in turn told them about foreign cultures. You'd be surprised how many Noah's-ark-like myths the informants told the Jesuits only after the Jesuits told them about Noah's ark. Or, to use another example, a number of books on Greek myth and tragedy retell an Inca story about the emperor opening a box and unleashing smallpox on the Incas, as an independent parallel to the story of Pandora's jar: but the source of the Inca smallpox story was himself a Jesuit-educated native informant who had learned the story of Pandora from the Jesuits before inventing the story of the Inca emperor. The contact between two cultures is a two-way street: the informants who report stories may contaminate them with the stories learned from those they are informing.
Golgafrinchan Ark Fleet Ship B
https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Golgafrinchan_Ark_Fleet_...
That ship carried our real ancestors. And the first thing they did was declare leaves to be money and then burn down forests to make it more valuable. -- https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/309207-thank-you-since-we-d...
Difficult merchant guilds want a special god of their own? Invent the concept of saints and name a celebrated dead guild member the saint of commerce and prosperity.
Backwards locals won't stop celebrating their fake goddess Ēostre? Create fake story about "Easter" to push instead.
My explanation would be, that religion was mostly used as a political power tool and power logic is the same and universal. If people believe, they are low and the emperor is a god - they won't rebell so easily.
But apart from that, they are very different, so of what foundations are you talking about, exactly?
Until then we'll just have to hear about outlier findings drip by drip so as not to upset established lore for the materialist West.