If humanity were to end today, for how long would evidence of us having been here remain?
How far into the future would you have to travel until we had been totally forgotten about?
Our massive buildings and cities would last for a while but, given enough time,
even they would eventually disappear and crumble away into nothingness. Could it be possible, then,
that there are undiscovered civilizations lost to history from our point of view, as well?
This is Unveiled, and today we’re uncovering the
extraordinary traces of ancient civilizations on planet Earth.
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When looking at ancient and long-lost cultures, it takes a massive and combined effort.
Historians study past events; archaeologists study the human story through the excavation
of sites and artifacts. But there are key roles too for anthropologists, biologists,
and geographers. Naturalists, geologists, and sometimes astronomers. The end goal
is always to try to understand what gave any given group the high status of civilization.
How did they work? And, what made them tick? Interestingly, there’s no gold standard
definition out there for what a civilization is. Experts still disagree on the finer details. But
generally, we can say that it’s when a large group settles in one spot, organizes itself, and creates
things like art and tools. The largeness of the group varies, as does the size of their base.
We can see human civilization, for example, as consisting of almost eight billion people
based on planet Earth… but we also think of humanity as having been split into many, smaller
civilizations made up of just a few thousand, based at specific locations on the world map.
The required organization comes through in many ways, but most likely via systems of trade,
labour, health, and transport. Economies, jobs, sewage systems, and roads, all contribute to
the framework of a civilization as we, humans, chiefly understand it. Which is one reason why,
in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, we’ve been so keen to build cities. For many,
cities are the heartbeat of modern human civilization, with increasing numbers of
people flocking to them. Of course, many of our greatest cities have existed for many
centuries before things like the industrial revolution and the digital boom took hold.
Humankind has always tended to group together to get things done, it’s just that our advancement
has particularly accelerated in recent times. But today, when we look back, the past lives we
can see clearest tend to have at least one similarity; they had a system of writing.
Throughout history, at least five major civilizations have created unique systems
of writing that other cultures then went on to use - the People of the Indus Valley, the Mayans,
the Ancient Egyptians, Ancient Chinese, and the Mesopotamians. A writing system from Ancient Egypt
is probably the most well-known to us today; hieroglyphs… although there is some debate
over how widely used these actually were, with it thought that they were chiefly used between
the higher classes, only. The oldest of those “big five”, however, are the Mesopotamians,
who are thought to date back as far as 4,000 years BC. A lot of what we know
about them comes from cuneiform, the chief Mesopotamian writing system. But does that
mean that Mesopotamia is truly the most ancient civilization to exist in our world? Not likely.
First, consider the world-famous Egyptian Sphinx, which some theories suggest could
be far older than it seems. It’s generally said to have been constructed around the year 2,500 B.C.,
but according to one study by the geologist Robert Schoch, it shows evidence of water
erosion that could date it back thousands of years beforehand. This observation can’t
otherwise be explained, however, so the water erosion hypothesis is still highly questioned.
A more widely debated mystery surrounds the megalithic structure known as Gobekli Tepe,
in Turkey. It’s thought to have once been a temple used for worship, and consists of hand-cut stone
pillars rising some ten to twenty feet tall. The pillars are then carved and decorated with
patterns and inscriptions. What’s most interesting, though, is that researchers
believe Gobekli Tepe dates back eleven millennia. That’s to about 9,000 years BC, and at least 5,000
years prior to Mesopotamia. However, there’s very little evidence of houses or settlements nearby,
and because of this, Gobekli Tepe isn’t widely considered evidence of a civilization. Although
it is doubtless that it did take many people and a coordinated effort to construct it.
As for well known, lost civilizations, Atlantis is by far the most famous… but also, arguably,
the least believable. We first learned of it through the ancient Greek philosopher Plato,
who wrote an account, in his dialogue “Critias”. He told of the city Atlantis attacking Athens
before being defeated and getting sunk into the sea as punishment. According to Plato,
Atlantis had advanced architecture, social organization, and agriculture - its only
downfall was its own arrogance. Most scholars consider Plato’s account to be fictional,
though that hasn’t stopped high numbers of people trying to find evidence of the sunken world.
But, what about before even Atlantis? Or the Sphinx and Gobekli Tepe? Is it possible that
there could have been a civilization on Earth before even humanity as a whole?
Researchers are generally wary to consider such scenarios, but a particularly high-profile idea
has been put forward by Gavin Schmidt and Adam Frank - The Silurian Hypothesis - which serves
to question how effectively modern science would be able to detect ancient groups. One
of the leading reasons why it’s difficult to find evidence of very old civilizations,
if there were any, is because Earth recycles its own crust over time. And, after millions of years,
the secrets that it did once hold are gone. Of course, fossils are one way we have to peer
into the past, but they’re also incredibly rare… with estimates that only around 0.01 percent of
animals actually become fossils for us to even try to find. If a proposed species was short lived,
then, there’s almost no chance of fossils for it being uncovered. Think of the dinosaurs;
they roamed the planet for more than 180 million years, and yet fossils of even
those colossal creatures are still quite rare. For some, it’s why (in our quest to discover the
most ancient secrets of Earth) we should switch our focus from below our feet to above our heads…
as advanced civilizations might not leave evidence of their presence in the ground, but in the sky.
If we can read the conditions of our atmosphere, and plot how the air around us came to develop in
the way it has done, we can begin to scale back through the years. Our burning of fossil fuels,
for example, has left a clear and distinct mark on our atmosphere. And, due to something called
the Suess effect, relating to the changes in carbon isotopes over time caused by the burning
of fossil fuels, we can look for similar distinct marks at other points along our planet’s history.
Similar levels of spiking isotopes occurred during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum,
about 56 million years ago, for instance, and at various times in the Cretaceous period. This isn’t
evidence of another civilization, but it does help us to visualise the past conditions of Earth,
and then to ponder whether any hypothetical civilization could’ve been built. Equally,
a past civilization could just as well be lurking in the gaps between these fossil fuel markers…
perhaps they existed for only a short time and not long enough to dramatically change anything,
or they never relied on burning fossil fuels in the first place.
Ultimately, we should give ourselves some credit. Modern humans are very good at plotting their
past. We have detailed accounts up to about 6,000 years ago thanks to written text and languages,
and we can generally trace ourselves back for hundreds of thousands of years more.
Still, although at present there’s no solid evidence that there was another civilization
as advanced as our own before our own, it’s also a line of questioning that we’ll likely never close
off for good. We can search for fossils and wait for a discovery to force a rethink of everything
we had previously believed, and we can look to the sky to try and detect clues as to how we got to
where we are now… but, in the meantime, we can keep trying to piece the human story together.
There are more mysteries like the Sphinx and Gobekli Tepe out there,
waiting to be deciphered. And those are the traces of ancient civilizations on Earth.
What do you think? Is there anything we missed? Let us know in the comments, check out these other
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