Were Humans More Advanced Before Us?

Our technology may be thousands of years behind. Over humankind’s long tenure on Earth, were there civilizations greater than our own, now lost to time? How would we find them, and would we know if we did?

Scientific American recently published an article called “Could an Industrial Prehuman Civilization Have Existed on Earth before Ours?”. The author, Steven Ashley, wondered if we had the methods to tell if a civilization existed before our own timeline after millions of years of tectonic plate movement and erosion would have recycled and covered the remains of ages past. This has come to be known as the Silurian Hypothesis, the possibility of a pre-human civilization. The difficulty in proving one is a paucity of extant objects. Even the many dinosaur bones in the Natural History Museums and paleontology labs the world over average one fossil per 10,000 years.

That may be thinking too large. We don’t need to go back millions of years to look for civilizations, or non-human civilizations at that. Our current understanding of human settlements stretches back little more than 10,000 years, yet humans have had the same relative brain capacity, the same intelligence, for about 500,000 years. It took less than sixty years for humans to go from horse-drawn carriages to a moon landing. Human civilizations could have risen to our current position dozens of times without leaving much of a trace…