How do we know that there wasn’t an intelligent species living here on earth before humans?
In: Earth Science
Your question is kind of the wrong way. Rather than trying to prove a negative (i.e. prove something we don’t know) it should be about taking observations, posing a hypothesis based off those observations and how they relate to each other, and then testing that hypothesis. Depending on the data and evidence gathered, either that hypothesis is proved or discarded.
So in this case, the question would really be, “what evidence do you have for the claim that there was earlier intelligent life?”
It can be useful to surmise and postulate beyond observations and evidence, but thought experiments like that aren’t proof of anything. Even though they can lead to new ideas for where to look for evidence, they aren’t proof themselves.
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