Slashdot Mirror
Was There a Civilization On Earth Before Humans? (theatlantic.com)
Adam Frank, writing for The Atlantic: We're used to imagining extinct civilizations in terms of the sunken statues and subterranean ruins. These kinds of artifacts of previous societies are fine if you're only interested in timescales of a few thousands of years. But once you roll the clock back to tens of millions or hundreds of millions of years, things get more complicated.
When it comes to direct evidence of an industrial civilization -- things like cities, factories, and roads -- the geologic record doesn't go back past what's called the Quaternary period 2.6 million years ago. For example, the oldest large-scale stretch of ancient surface lies in the Negev Desert. It's "just" 1.8 million years old -- older surfaces are mostly visible in cross section via something like a cliff face or rock cuts. Go back much farther than the Quaternary and everything has been turned over and crushed to dust.
And, if we're going back this far, we're not talking about human civilizations anymore. Homo sapiens didn't make their appearance on the planet until just 300,000 years or so ago. [...] Given that all direct evidence would be long gone after many millions of years, what kinds of evidence might then still exist? The best way to answer this question is to figure out what evidence we'd leave behind if human civilization collapsed at its current stage of development. Mr. Frank, along with Gavin Schmidt, Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, have published their research on the subject [PDF].
When it comes to direct evidence of an industrial civilization -- things like cities, factories, and roads -- the geologic record doesn't go back past what's called the Quaternary period 2.6 million years ago. For example, the oldest large-scale stretch of ancient surface lies in the Negev Desert. It's "just" 1.8 million years old -- older surfaces are mostly visible in cross section via something like a cliff face or rock cuts. Go back much farther than the Quaternary and everything has been turned over and crushed to dust.
And, if we're going back this far, we're not talking about human civilizations anymore. Homo sapiens didn't make their appearance on the planet until just 300,000 years or so ago. [...] Given that all direct evidence would be long gone after many millions of years, what kinds of evidence might then still exist? The best way to answer this question is to figure out what evidence we'd leave behind if human civilization collapsed at its current stage of development. Mr. Frank, along with Gavin Schmidt, Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, have published their research on the subject [PDF].
and the Flintstones.
Short answer? No. Not on any scale like our current civilization.
Evidence: the coal is still here for us to burn. :P And there's no plastic in lake and sea sediments. :P
Glass doesn't rot, doesn't rust...
Creatures are pretty much universally threatened by their own excrement bacteria.
Any civilization would need to deal with shit. Porcelain is a technology ideally suited. It would be discovered and used. Ceramics were used by humans for chamber pots very early in our history.
The fossil record would contain a large number of intelligent dinosaur toilets, if they had existed.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
...written by Klaus Seibel https://www.thalia.at/shop/hom...
If the headline is a yes/no question, the answer is "No".
If the answer was "Yes", then the headline wouldn't be a question. By making it a question, the headline writer gets to have the headline be truthful while being much more interesting than the equivalent statement.
What industrial process generates as a byproduct, concentrations of iridium and carbon cenospheres; 64 million years ago?
There are those who believe that life here began out there, far across the universe, with tribes of humans who may have been the forefathers of the Egyptians, or the Toltecs, or the Mayans, that they may have been the architects of the Great Pyramids, or the lost civilizations of Lemuria or Atlantis. Some believe that there may yet be brothers of man who even now fight to surviveâ"somewhere beyond the heavens!
They were called the Krell. Had this big project, creation without instrumentality. Their own flaws consumed them overnight once they turned on their big machine.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The place to look for civilizations that pre-date us is, of course, Antarctica. We really have not done much exploring of the Transantarctic Mountains. Who knows what might be found there.
Another day closer to redwood heaven
I think the more interesting variation of the question isn't, was there a civilization like ours.. industrial, nuclear, "advanced". Most signs point to no... but were there any pre-industrial civilizations that didn't make it and died out? They wouldn't have used up the earth's resources like we have. They wouldn't have produced advanced materials that would survive millions of years. They wouldn't have left a layer of radioactive material to be preserved in the fossil record.
A pre-industrial civilization, with their homes made out of earth and tools made out of stone would be completely wiped out from the ravages of time, and we would have no way of knowing.
Well if we can still find fossils of dinosaurs many millions of years old that were not "crushed to dust" wouldn't a city leave some trace?
I find both the Drake equation and this hypothesis to be faulty.
The Drake equation outputs whatever you decide to plug into it. It is a fine mathematical example of manipulating non-scientific people since the input to the equation is the supposition. Any faulty supposition gives an erroneous output. We do not know what the input should be. Therefor we do not have an accurate output.
The supposition that an entire city would leave *nothing* when the bones of ancient animals can be found is a faulty presupposition.
Another consultant who stuck it out.
"We are the Priests, of the Temples of Syrinx..."
If there was a global industrialized civilization like ours 1,000,000 years ago, we would know. Even if all their foundations had long been covered by eons and crushed to dust, we would still see the impact of the civilization in our geology. Humans in the last 100 years have permanently changed millions of square miles of millions of centuries of geologic record. If a species before us had that kind of impact, we would know.
Now, if there was some species of dinosaur at some time that lived in small mud-hut villiages, I can't see that we would ever be lucky enough to find evidence of that.
Look up topics like "out-of-place artifacts", tools and manufactured items found embedded in coal rock, or unexpectedly found at great depths during construction or mining.
I'll just leave this here. TLDR, proponents of out of place objects are either seeing what they want to see, perpetuating a hoax, or have an insufficient grasp of relevant scientific or historical topics.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Yeah, my wife does this.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
We have easy direct evidence from ice cores accounting for last 3 million years and numerous direct and indirect proxies going back at least 2 billion years.
Glass doesn't rot, doesn't rust...
But does erode.
We are pretty sure there was no other modern civ, because otherwise we would have had evidence of coal mining, oil reclamation, all sort of stuff which would have been exploited, but we find no evidence of. We can be reasonably sure there was no iron age using civ (and metal generally), for the same reason, the mining would have left trace, if only in where we would expect to find metal ore and don't find it - because it has been mined. Now orogeny/subduction could have created some at plate separation, but the rest of the continent ? Doubtful. If you go to lower tech level, like stone age civ ? There is no way whatsoever to know. Feel free to speculate about dinosaurus civ.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Looks like they had a triumvirate headed by Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. They had some ministers for water (Varunan) or fire (Agni) etc. The head of the cabinet was Indran. Lots of detail of their biographies are available.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I think it's fair to say that more has gone on in terms of civilizations than what we understand today.
There are many ancient architectural and scientific mysteries that suggest greater levels of sophistication than we believe their creators could have had.
Along with that, nature is a lot more destructive than we can imagine - I remember the first time I saw an actual Ulfbrerht sword/made from the finest steel, but reduced to basically flakes in a thousand years which suggests that time will eliminate traces of technology. Although, dinosaur bones and footprints remain and we haven't found anything more than that from millions of years of
The most likely answer is that there hasn't been anything before our civilization, otherwise I would think we'd find definite proof of it.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Fort Knox and nuclear power plants should leave behinf
He spoke once on a college campus where I was working and I dropped in to hear him. He was nutty, but a really nice person, and had surprising musical knowledge. I was sad to hear that he died a couple of months ago.
You are welcome on my lawn.
That's how I know people lived on my land decades before I was here. Extrapolating, I'm sure this will work for periods of millions of years too.
They are able to control insects remotely via telepathy to watch the humans. They've already discovered everything discoverable and now have nothing to do.
What is more inconceivable?
1. We are alone in the Universe. Life originated only here and developed sophisticated beings capable of advanced civilization only here, and only once. We are the center of the universe. IT'S ALL ABOUT US, a speck of dust on the edge of a galaxy - one of 200 Billion galaxies we currently estimate!!!
2. The world is full of life, and full of intelligent advanced beings. They have been here in the past and will come again.
I pick option 2.
no, you spew in ignorance.
any metal tools or walls would be pushed into the earth and crushed over the timescales mentioned. that's how plate tectonics work.
fossils are rare and hard to find, including any kind of tools even for less than one million years.
all the objections people make here are done without even reading the paper, they are addressed
Maybe if, somehow, we found enough evidence of a previous non-hominid terrestrial civilization, and what caused their downfall, then maybe, just maybe, we'd get pulled up short long enough to stop and think about some of the things we're doing right now, and how they may affect us, as a species, a hundred or few years from now.
..or, maybe, everyone would just say "LOL, what a bunch of losers, they blew themselves up! Glad we're smarter than that!" and just go on without missing a beat, like the arrogant animals we are.
This idea has been batted around in science fiction circles since the 1990s if not earlier. I guess maybe it's news now if actual scientists are taking it somewhat seriously for the first time? At least it's the first time I've heard about.
I'm skeptical anyhow. If a prior civilization was ever truly widespread, I don't see how we wouldn't find remnants of it. There's a lot of stuff we produce that doesn't rot or corrode away with the passage of time. We'd be turning up their flint tools and stone sculptures, their pottery shards, their bricks, their broken bits of concrete, not to mention anything fashioned from noble metals (including aluminum). You can dig up gold coins that were buried several thousand years ago, and they come up looking like new. It's hard to see how additional millions of years would make much difference there.
ancient surface
Who gives a shit? We can dig. Is the concept of stratum new territory for this guy?
That's the first clue to know where to dig. It's how most things are discovered. Just digging random holes on a planet with a surface area of near 200 million square miles is generally not very productive.
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.
Beware of Sales Reps bearing gifts.
Ants have been around over 100 million years. They have a complex social structure and job specialization. They farm fungus and aphids for food. They build vast homes that are essentially cities. They don't have art that we known of and they don't have technology unless you count building bridges and towers using their own bodies, but they've got most of the other attributes of what we call civilization.
L4 and L5 are them most stable Lagrange points in a system of orbiting bodies, and stuff in them will tend to remain in them even if the bodies that create them experience non-catastrophic changes. An advanced civilization, even one like ours just getting into space, would position something at L4 or L5 Earth/Sun or Earth/Moon Lagrange Points, a slightly more advanced civilization would put something at the Jupiter/Sun L4/L5, even if it was just a funny gold record with engraved instructions for playing it... So, we should be looking there.
Steve -- If you have to call it a system, you don't know what it is.
We don't know for certain and any that you come up with can be dismissed by claiming that they did not develop that technology. However, there is one process which we know does preserve things for millions of years and which any intelligent civilization would have to leave behind: fossilized bones of the species who built it.
Apart from the lack of any evidence of fossilized graves there are no fossils of creatures with brains large enough to have the intelligence to make a civilization. So either they not only removed themselves but all their close ancestors from the entire fossil record or they had a radically different biology which allowed them to gain intelligence with a far smaller brain per body mass than any other animal. So the answer is clearly no because there is absolutely no fossil record to support it abd even things as simple as ant nests leave behind a fossil record.
Until people knew to look for Vikings in North America their presence was invisible, and that was less than two thousand years ago. Go back even fifteen thousand years and how would anyone know where to look for ancient civilizations?
... and you're welcome and stuff.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
would be very difficult to detect by archaeological means.
That's because a perfectly civilization would never throw anything matter away; just entropy.
Take shell middens, something we know a number of extinct civilizations by. State fish and wildlife agencies encourage restaurants to send their oyster shells to programs which return them to the ocean; it turns out that old oyster shells are the preferred habitat for oyster larvae.
Of course the archaeological resource par excellence is the burial. Eventually we're going to run out of space for graves, and later even cremation is going to be present pollution issues. Sooner or later we're going to have to compost people. It sounds weird, but in truth if you look at our funerary practices they're already weird.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
If by 'industrial age' one means humanity circa, say, 19th Century steam age, there would be some traces I figure. Some inferred as mysteries unto themselves. A good example is the "Colombian exchange." Any paleontologist fifty million years from now, assuming they know plate tectonics, is going to be wondering why all these different fossils are found in only very specific places before a certain rock layer, then suddenly are everywhere in the world above that rock layer. From dogs to cows to sheep to peach trees to corn that's going to invite questions.
Seems to me the most non-degradable thing that would be clearly "man" made would be ceramic sinks and toilets. Assuming that, given alien anatomy and culture, they'd even use such things.
Plate tectonics might very well destroy all traces of us on Earth. But there would be a couple of lunar landing stages plus some other junk on the Moon. Plus a poor little Mars rover running around collecting samples.
Have gnu, will travel.
My money is on a civilization of nomadic performing troupes so small that you can't see them.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
We find fossils all the way to the beginning of multicellular organisms. What we find is consistent with what DNA tells us. We can say with certainty that there was no intelligent, tool-making vertebrate on the surface of the earth before us and hence no large scale technical civilization. It doesn't matter whether all their achievements decayed.
Furthermore, given that we find 170 million year old fossilized dinosaur tracks from populations much smaller than would be required for civilizations, tracks from widespread wheeled vehicle use should be abundant, let alone fossilized technology. But there is absolutely nothing.
It's a good question to ponder, for about a minute. If it takes you any longer to figure out why this can't be true, you aren't a scientist. The authors of this paper are little different from flat earthers.
Fossils are neither rare nor hard to find. Good grief, I went fossil hunting as a kid. Some of the most common fossils are trilobites; they appeared about 520 million years ago and died out 250 million years ago.
Seriously, what is wrong with you people?
This is a historic /. thread! I had to scroll all this way to finally see Trump mentioned! I'm excitedly hopeful!
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
as they would absolutely lose their shit to find out we aren't the " chosen " ones.
It would cause an existential crisis for a vast majority of the human species to learn such a thing.
Not to mention the major religions would discredit such things because they would lose control over their flocks overnight.
They're never going to give up that power.
Melts all the ice caps we will find the evidence there under the ice where it was hidden so it would not corrupt us.
Rick B.
and warmongers. What keeps us from switching to nuclear is that the cheap way to recycle waste can lead to weapons grade material and the expensive ways are unsafe because, well, they're expensive and businessmen are always cutting corners. Fukushima happened because the guy running the plant was a cheapskate.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I am sort of an amateur fossil hunter / rock hound. My SO and I dig up stuff and bring it back, much of it gets tossed in the yard. We donâ(TM)t find fossils from there over here like someone intentionally moved them.
There are too many issues with this theory.
Gold and diamonds have been recognized for their longevity by humans for millennia. It is extremely likely that any civilization would also identify gold and diamonds as being rare and thus valuable trinkets, and they would have been worked in various ways. Even after millions of years, gold that had been worked, or diamonds that had been cut, would be readily recognizable. Yet we have found none. Further, certain minerals, radioactive materials, etc, would have been collected and ended up in surface deposits that we also have not found. It's likely we would find radioactive elements with half lives that were not natural and are byproducts of an advanced civilization.
The burning of any fossil fuels would have left very obvious deposits in the ice cores that go back millions of years.
Many surface areas of the earth are very old, The Appalachians date back 400 million years. The Negev Desert in Israel has literally been sitting there as-is for 1.8 million years. Tunnels bored through mountains or passes cut through them would leave scars for hundreds of millions of years.
They most certainly did not make it to the moon. We have easily found all of the landers and other probes in imagery from orbiting spacecraft, and they are going to sit there untouched for billions more years.
Even so, we haven't found one piece of evidence to support this theory.
Better known as 318230.
Yet that's like being excited about finding fossil beetles and thinking it means you'd notice human civilization. There are a lot more beetles than humans.
Iggymanz claimed that fossils didn't last more than a million years; it was in response to that. We also have found plenty of fossils of uncommon species, so that objection is bogus as well.
The idea that there was a prior civilization on earth that killed itself through climate change is on the level with believing that the earth is a flat disk resting on the back of a turtle; it is utterly preposterous.
What about natural occurring nuclear reactors?
They had all the basic elements before humans, including symbolic representation.
Homo Erectus had language and sea travel, which is a start and enough to call it a proto-civilization.
Habilis did not. Neither did Sediba.
So certainly nothing before 1.2 million years ago.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
> Except for stone and metal. Duh. If there was anything "industrial", then we'd know. And we'd likely know if any dinosaurs used any sort of STONE TOOLS which are a pretty obvious stepping stone towards more advanced civilizations.
We don't find enough in the way of fossils to have a complete record.
Human civilisation has lasted what, 10,000 years - on that order of magnitude at least.
Some almost unchanged dinosaur species are known to have survived up to 30 million years, and of those there are only two dozen specimens in existence. Entertain for a moment that they may have developed a civilisation much like ours.
Rounding out, we have potentially 1.2 million years between examples. Even if their civilisation lasted ten times the length of ours, you could still fit 12 of those between fossil examples of that creature.
Fossilisation is rare, *REALLY* rare. If humans existed at the time of the dinosaurs in the numbers we exist today, we might if we were really lucky have just two fossils preserved to be dug up 65+ million years later.
If we're going to consider what remains of civilizations we have to consider the Younger Dryas period where ice core samples suggest the polar ice caps were MILES thick and extended from the north pole well into North America.
We have to keep in mind that human civilisations are characteristically coastal and also that means the earth had a greater land mass than today. With ice caps that thick and mounting evidence that this glacial period was ended catastrophically by some sort of orbital or volcanic activity, most of the evidence will be under at least 90 metres of water today.
Whatever happened back then it wiped the face of the earth clean with the amount of energy and water released. The only evidence left behind would have to have been deliberately buried high, like Göbekli Tepe. That would have been a very bad day.
So looking back only 10,000 years into pre-history is hard enough without adding two more zeros. Why don't we try being a little more practical and look 10-20 thousand years back first and try to figure out what happened then so the same thing doesn't happen to us?
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
I gave this some thought and must say the question is fascinating.
I don't think there is much material evidence that would survive a couple million years. However, there is one area in which humans are already leaving a permanent mark on Earth. How would a future civilization, millions of years into the future, know we were here?
By the mass extinction event that we are causing. Our scientists know about previous mass extinctions, so we can assume the current one will be visible to the future as well.
So looking into the past, all one has to assume is that a past civilisation would also cause such events, which boils down to the question of would they explode unto the planet like we did? IMHO the answer is a resounding YES. Almost all the destruction caused by humanity is caused by growth - of population and industry. They are just two sides of the same coin, and growth is embedded into our genes. Every species tries to multiply, expand its territory, grow - in short: To win. The ecological disaster we are facing is the simple logical consequence of a species winning so hard that it doesn't even understand it.
Any advanced species would hit a period in their progress like this, and would likely take some time to turn their society around from "we must do everything to survive in this world" to "actually, it would be cute if something else would survive as well".
Other paths are imaginable, but much less likely. We should assume that a previous civilisation would be marked in the fossil records as a mass extinction event.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
(obligatory 2001: A Space Odyssey reference)
Stop being dumb asses. Next question.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Oh sure, even the guys in the article didn't think it was likely, they just thought it would be really hard to tell if it happened, which is a fun thought experiment.
However, I've known the Drake equation to be nonsense since I read it in "Intelligent Life in the Universe," which I read so many decades ago in my teens. You can't multiply guesses together like that and expect to get anything out but science fiction. Drake didn't even know if there are OTHER variables that are important. Which ones yous say? That's my point. We don't know. And let's stop this "dolphins-are-intelligent" thing. Why? Because they form primitive groups, quack to each other like Flipper and play with seaweed? When they write a sonnet and fly to the moon etc. I'll consider them "intelligent." The same for other animals. It is what they can do and want to do naturally that defines their intelligence, not what you can train them to do after a million dollars of training. The bar for something to be considered intelligent has been placed far to low - same for so-called AI.
A previous industrial civilization would have depleted the fossil fuel supply of the Earth to a degree that probably would have been perceivable and even not to have allowed our present industrial society to develop.
I suspect that the evolution of what I would call bio-genetic (just to order my own thoughts) processes were not mature enough to allow for intelligent life in the past and the further back you go the less capable the genetic engine of life was of creating a complex intelligent form. We are 4 billion years old. Our bio-genetic advance is that old.
E Proelio Veritas.
I still fossil hunt (mostly braciopods). There are areas where the earth is nothing but fossils 50+ feet? at least. Layers upon layers. I would think if there was a civilization we would find things where they were not supposed to be. Like all the fossils and geodes that have been moved to my backyard.
metal tools ... crushed... that's how plate tectonics work.
And this is upvoted?
SOME stuff BETWEEN tectonic plates gets crushed. No, the entire lithosphere hasn't been recycled. Why else do you think the general shapes of the continents are identifiable since PANGEA?
What has slashdot come to? Have you YOU read the paper? It never mentions "crushed". It waves away the whole "we would have dug stuff up by now" on page 5, in half a paragraph. 4 sentences. 1) "That seems unlikely". 2) The Earth is big and we haven't dug much. 3) We rarely find old shit. 4) We're going to say it seems unlikely again, but use more words this time with a shoutout to our homeboy Kidwell and his work. (And their point is DESPITE kidwell's work.)
This a scientific paper that ignores the fact that we've not found any out of place artifacts with a handwave and an appeal to small numbers. "It's rare". But this sort of bullshit hurts the credibility of all of paleontology, evolution, and science in general. A SINGLE fossil out of place would put the entire concept of evolution into question. But we've never found one. Plenty of hoaxes and people simply being wrong, but no hard evidence. And we've never found any stone tools at those layers. In the entire history of paleontology.
There ARE indeed unknowns out there. But this isn't one of them.
There's an old story about the students who went to study the phenomena surrounding Mt. St. Helens some years after it blew its top.
The professor pointed out some layered strata on a cut hillside with a long dark streak running from end to end.
He and asked the students to calculate "How long did it take for that dark streak to form in geologic time?"
The students gave their answers usually in the form of hundreds of thousands to millions of years.
The professor then told them it was formerly the parking lot asphalt of the National Park.
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
It takes millions of years for plant remians to be buried to a sufficient under-sea depth to even be capable of producing oil. It then takes hundreds of thousands of years for the oil to actually form.
In short, if there was a pre-human industrial civilization 2 million years ago, why didn't they use up all the oil? It's fairly unlikely they *started* their mass-energy production with nuclear or solar. If they were here, then the oil should have been grossly depleted long before we got to it.
"The Green Marauder".
There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.
nice, in their Acknowledgements, pag.18.
yes, trilobytes are marine fossils and common. guess again, we're talking about land things and there is reason the marine ones are common
yes, sea life fossils are common for interesting reason, we're talking about land fossils. I'm amused at people who have weird mental model of plate tectonics of continents vs. ocean
The first words on the paper are "(in press Int. J. Astrobio)". This is the stage at which you do things like proof-reading. You also do things like putting the figures inline with the text, setting up captions, and formatting the reference list into the house style. This is a "pre-publication server".
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
The Old Testament mentions giants in a couple of places, once before Adam and Eve. Giants may be a misinterpretation, physical size vs. big brains. but I can't read Hebrew or Greek so I'll never know. I'm not in the least religious, certainly not as far as the New Testament is concerned, so reading the OT was like reading a very old bit of science fiction. It is thrilling, trust me. There are lines that will make you laugh out loud plus others that will make you question whether we came from apes or whether we are a twisted combination of aliens and apes. If you read it, you'll be alone with your thoughts. I can't find a damn soul who's read the OT from start to finish and is willing to swap theories about it. If you're doubting what I say, just read the bits about the Ark of the Covenant. Then check out Leviticus. If that's not atomic radiation or weaponry, then what is it?
would a collapsed civilization leave behind...? See "A Canticle For Leibowitz" (Walter M. Miller)
Of course. For a complete record, we would need EVERY LIVING THING to have been fossilized. There will always be gaps.
You can throw about numbers like 10,000 years willy nilly, but stone tools predate homo sapians, and even the genus homo. We've found them as far back as 3.3 million years. If there was anything that developed "industrial technology", I'm willing to bet they started with stone tools. ...huh. Ok, so with that knowledge, you, me, and the authors kinda missed the obvious answer to "was there a civilization on Earth before humans?", Yes: homo erectus had simple tools.
ANYWAY, entertaining for a moment that previous life on Earth had a similar development to humans, it seems very reasonable to assume they'd have a similar rate of development. That is, an exponential rate, as prior developments help them develop technology at an ever faster rate. And that likewise implies they'd be stuck using simple tools for a REALLY long time. We used stone tools for 3.3 million years. We used copper tools for 10,000 years. Iron for 4,000 years. If their development was anything like ours, they had a LONG ASS period of time where they made and used stone tools. And I dunno if you missed this somehow, but... stone tools don't have to fossilize. They're already stone. All we would need to find is stone tools at sufficient depth in the right stratum. Which applies to nearly every square inch of Earth. .... along with enough evidence that they weren't simply buried there by someone 3 million years ago.
You know? I wonder if the pyramids will be around in 65+ million years. Probably. They are made of stone after all.
The point is: they are older than a million years.
Yes, and I found plenty of those too.
Really, talking to you is like talking to a young earth creationist.