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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The Wheel weaves as the Wheel wills. [This](http://sevenspokes.com/chronology/creation.html) explains the breaking of the world quite well.
With the complete lack of evidence, the only way this could be true is if the civilization became so advanced that they could completely erase their existence (perhaps in an ecological effort to return the earth to a pristine state). If they just wiped themselves out with nukes, there would have been no opportunity to erase their archeology, and we would have found evidence by now.
Based on our history, technological advance seems to be an exponential process, so if we survive a few more centuries, this seems plausible for us.
If that were true, it seems very unlikely that they would have left any of their fellow humans behind in a primitive state to evolve into us, but perhaps another species could have reached that state and then covered their tracks if they went elsewhere, or self-terminated their civilization.
There have been civilizations that have nearly disappeared – the Mississippian civilization is an example. A native civilization of cities along the Mississippi river. It had earth and wood cities, not stone. So after hundreds of years the only thing left was giant mounds of earth.
The Mayan civilization was an advanced civilization in terms of culture and sophistication, but stone age. The civilization disappeared but the stone pyramids and other buildings remained buried under jungle. So we were able to find them.
There could easily be stone age civilizations to rival the Mayans and Aztecs that have disappeared under water or if they lacked pyramids or other large stone buildings.
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.
Extremely unlikely. There’s plenty of evidence of a very rudimentary civilisation at that time so if there was an advanced civilisation back the we most certainly would have also found evidences of them. Unless they were so advanced that they successfully erased all traces of their existence.
**There is evidence that there was a global civilization**. The ancient stonework on *every continent* is in most cases made from **Geopolymere**. basically a concrete-putty that is better than modern concrete and noone know how to make it today.
If you google **polygonal masonry**, you will find literally hundreds of youtubers piecing all the data together.
If you sift through enough of the pictures people are compiling, you can even estimate which cultures did it first because you can see the quality and application of the geopolymere improve. For example, at the Acropolys in Greece, and some locations in Japan, their techniques seem to be a little more crude, then you go to [Cuzco](https://www.ecosia.org/images?q=geopolymere%20cuzco) in Peru and their stonework is jaw dropping and incomprehensible to any modern mason or engineer.
To any naysayers, feel free to speak your piece, but I have visited sites on all but one continent and have the picture evidence personally, and if anecdotes are not enough, look through the metric ton of content that people are piecing together. There is no point to argue against literal rock solid evidence.
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