Civilizations Before Us
Time devours everything. We can see through time, but we can never be sure that we got it right. That being said, our anthropologists did Herculean work in determining that it took humans 10,000 years to go from hunter-gatherers to world domination. Considering the vastness of time that humans and life have been on Earth, could this have happened once before? Might there have been an even more advanced, non-human species, say lizard people. It’s possible. There was enough “time.” These questions were put forth by Adam Frank and Gavin Schmidt in their paper titled, “The Silurian Hypothesis,” where they tried to figure out what in the geologic record would be a sign of a previous industrial civilization. In the following video, host Joe Scott offers his take, which he sometimes calls “wild speculation.”
