Recorded history only goes back around 5,000 years, but humans have been around for 200,000 years. Could there have been highly sophisticated ancient societies of which no trace remains?
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While theoretically possible, given an absence of evidence, we can only go with what we can prove. The idea of a civilization of early humans who left absolutely 0 trace or evidence behind seems unlikely, and we have no proof or evidence supporting such a theory.
Gobekle Tepe is a good example of ancient civilization. There definitely are ancient civilizations being covered up by the young earth propaganda.
Its not likely.
The probability of there being absolutely zero trace of such a civilization is extremely low. Yes, the majority of buildings, artifacts, and evidence of our current civilization would be mostly destroyed in several thousand years…. but there would still be the random odd item that got lost/left in a highly stable environment and could be found 10’s of thousands of years later, if not longer. We find skeletal remains (rarely) that are older. Advanced medicine leaves evidence. Even if that evidence is a lack of issues. None of the remains demonstrate evidence of advanced medical care.
You’d think that there would be a couple of trace points. Stainless steel is eternal. The high rates of extinction should be visible in the fossil record, the concentration of minerals should be visible. We are not without impact on the environment no matter what era it is. Absent any of that, the most likely case is that this is the first go around for us.
We don’t know that there weren’t. But we have no evidence that there were.
I also don’t know that there are no unicorns living in my sock drawer, but I have no evidence that there are.
Define “advanced”. Homo Sapiens have been around a long time and had the same brains back at the beginning as we do now. If there were civilizations that produced artifacts then the evidence would be around. But it’s pretty clear that arrow and spear points are all that remains
To get to a civilization like we know it today you leave traces on earth that still could be detected. Civilization as we know it requires resources mined from the ground to get metals and other stuff we use. We would see traces of that on earth today because most of earth’s surface is the same as it was 50,000 years ago. When humans started to mine we found ore with high metal content on the surface, that was what we first minded and most of it is gone today. If there was a civilization before what is know that metal would not bee left there.
Recorded history might only go back 5000 years but there is other data sources that go back further like ice cores. There is 2.7 million years old ice cores [https://www.science.org/content/article/world-s-oldest-ice-core-could-solve-mystery-flipped-ice-age-cycles](https://www.science.org/content/article/world-s-oldest-ice-core-could-solve-mystery-flipped-ice-age-cycles) We can from them see what was in earth atmosphere in the past like how we fund lead from Roman silver mines in ice cores from Greenland. We can see that the production dropped at the same time as major plagues [ttps://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1721818115](https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1721818115)
If they reached out level and used nuclear reactors and weapons you will see elements in ice cores that do not exist naturally on earth.
But if you by civilization mean something that is “characterized by the development of a political state, social stratification, urbanization, and symbolic systems of communication beyond natural spoken language” to quote https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization then it might be possible. There could be some locations where humans started to farm and live in cities but never build stone monuments that survived or mined ore from the ground. That might could have happened before because the types of trace that are left are easier to miss.
So if it is possible or not depends on what you call advanced. Something more advanced we knew existed at the time, that could exist but not something that reaches something that approaches our technology level.
Depending on how advanced you’re talking then yes, it’s possible there were advanced humans or civilisations 50,000+ years ago and that we’ve found no trace. But very unlikely at this stage.
Whatever advancement they would not have reached space age or nuclear as those remnants would have been found. But it’s definitely possible that farming and more advanced wood construction may have occurred multiple times. When the Maui were discovered, they had begun moving from basic hunter gatherer and were planting potato crops and building wooden forts. There might even have been some previous advancements into metallurgy that could have faded away. Stone tools have been recovered dating back millions of years but very little art and carvings have been found for ages beyond 40,000 years. However a few have had abstract images or engravings that could suggest early beginnings to writing.
But it’s also worth noting that humans nearly went extinct between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago. So there’s far less humans who would have been facing far more adversity, making advancements difficult and unlikely.
The biggest mark against the idea is the lack of physical evidence. Even what seem to us to have been fairy primitive civilizations have left behind pottery, architecture, weapons, art, coinage, and garbage dumps.
Not a whole lot is known for certain, for instance, about the Indus Valley Civilization, Elamites, Minoans, Hittites, Phrygians, Etruscans, or Zapotec civilization (due to their scripts either being undeciphered or them not leaving much writing behind), but it’s not for a lack of artifacts.
Thus, a super advanced civilization, human or otherwise, existing in the past and leaving no physical evidence seems unlikely at best.
It’s an interesting hypothesis, but we’ve found no evidence to support it. If they were highly advanced and sophisticated, even more so than the ones we currently know about, then they should have left something behind that we would find. Stone tools that were used about 3 million years ago by some of the first humans have been found in Kenya. So, if a civilization was more advanced than just basic stone tools and existed within the past couple million years they should’ve produced some evidence of their existance for us to find.
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