The Silurian Hypothesis Suggests An Advanced Civilization Lived On Earth Before Humans

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after the fictional species.

Species long before humanity, but poses the intriguing hypothetical query of whether it would be feasible to discern "geological fingerprints" of a bygone civilization that went extinct millions of years ago.

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So far, humans are the only beings we're aware of, and our industrial society has survived for around 300 years since we introduced large-scale manufacturing techniques. This is a relatively short period of time compared to how long our species has been around, and a minuscule fraction of the time that complex life has thrived on land.

There's a brief time frame here that leads to a question: Could this situation have occurred previously?

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The changes we make to the environment and ecosystems may not last a million years from now. In fact, the evidence of our presence may be relatively shallow - just a few centimeters thick in the sediment. This could be the case even if humanity endures for a much longer time.

The longer human civilization exists, the bigger the signal one should expect to find in the record," the team states. "However, the longer a civilization lasts, the more environmentally sustainable its practices must become in order to continue existing. The more sustainable a society is in its resource use (such as energy production, manufacturing, or farming), the smaller its impact on the rest of the planet tends to be. But the smaller the impact on the planet, the smaller the signal will be left in the geological record.

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The team warns of "severe and potentially long-lasting radioactive fallout in the case of a nuclear disaster."

As they do not have these markers, the distinctiveness of the event may likely be seen in the many different fingerprints that are relatively individual, unlike a consistent set of changes linked to a single natural cause.

The team doesn't provide a clear answer in the paper, but suggests that if there were other ancient advanced species, they might be discovered by exploring sediment records with unusual elemental and compositional characteristics.

While we have serious reservations that any previous civilization existed before ours, thoroughly examining this question in a formal way that spells out what evidence such a civilization would need to leave behind leads to additional thought-provoking queries that intersect with astrobiology and Anthropocene research.

We hope this paper will provide motivation to refine the assumptions we've made so we can better address the question posed in the title.