The Silurian Hypothesis—a Technological Civilisation on Earth before Humans?

Steven D. Howe’s Wrench and Claw is a tale of discovery of evidence of a prior technological civilisation that made it to the Moon before an unfortunate event brought down the curtain on their history on Earth.

Then there’s “Dinosaurs—The True Story”.

The problem is that modern humans (depending on how you define that) have only been around between 50,000 and 200,000 years before the present. If there were a technological civilisation on the scale of our own, evidence of it would still be around, if not artefacts then depleted iron mines, coal fields, etc. You have to go back tens of millions of years for the recycling of the Earth’s crust to wipe out that kind of evidence, and humans don’t go that far back.

That doesn’t mean there might not have been a species similar to humans that evolved back in geological time, developed into a technological civilisation, and then destroyed themselves or were wiped out by some calamity (for example, inventing socialism) and left no record of their presence that we’ve been clever enough to discover so far.

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