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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If they were they left no traces.
A civilization as advanced as our that did things like detonating nuclear bombs in the atmosphere would have been impossible to miss in the fossil record.
But even far less advanced ones would have left traces.
Agriculture and domesticating plants and animals leaves traces. We know when pigs, cows etc were domesticated by looking at their genes and also know when the various types of crops our ancestors domesticated when they started in on agriculture got started.
None of these are old enough. So either those advanced civilizations were still hunter an gatherers or their food died with them without leaving any trace.
The wild ancestor of our chicken originally came from east Asia and are now found around the world. Cows make up more biomass than any other vertebrate land animal. We have introduced rats everywhere we went. Cats and dogs are a thing.
In the absence of humans all the plants and animals would still remain and appear in places were they shouldn’t.
Unless whatever killed the civilization also did away with every single crop and livestock animal and pet and pest. There would be traces.
Traces would also appear in the absence of things.
We know that humans migrating to new places did coincide with the extinction of megafauna. If humans had visited places like the Americas much earlier they were much more gentle in their interaction with the species they found.
any civilization advanced enough to build boats and visit new places would have inadvertently introduced invasive species and killed of native ones just by visiting.
That is just farming and rising cattle.
If this hypothetical civilization got to the point where they started using fossil fuel that would be noticeable too. Not just thanks to emissions and the traces Co2 leaves in ice-cores and tree rings, but also because if they had used all the easily available stuff it wouldn’t have been around for us to find.
We make a lot of stuff that will be around tens of millennia from now. Some of it on purpose even.
So basically this supposed civilization would have to have been limited to a single geographic location where all their trace could have been wiped out with them and never went around the world digging up stuff like coal or iron ore or gold in large amounts and never gone for domestication of animals and plants the way we did and never really developed an industry.
From a fossil perspective the impact of our human civilization will be not unlike the impact of an asteroid. Very hard to miss.
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