🇳🇱
A good read, something Ir ead when it was first published (check out the actual study if you can) and it has had me thinking about it ever since.
If there was intelligent life on earth in the distant past, would we even know about it?
People dont realize just how little we know about our past. Dinosaur fossils give people this impression that we have some evolutionary map going back to the beginning of time, but the truth is that it is a very very small percentage of the actual life on earth.
To put it into perspective just how mind boggling old the earth is and how much time there was for civilizations to rise, fall, and get lost again, consider Pangea. Many of you probably think the earth started as one big super content, Pangea, and it split up, thats the whole story. But the surprising truth is supercontinents like pangea form in cycles, every 300 - 500 million years the continents come together to form a super content like Pangea, then split and form again over and over again. In fact as far as we know there have been at least 8 cycles so far of super continents (one big land mass) and pangea just happened to be the most recent iteration. In that time a hell of a lot of fossil evidence is destroyed.
While I wouldn't say that past intelligent life existed on earth the truth is intelligent life could have existed dozens of times before and there would be little to no evidence left today to let us know about it.
https://www.livescience.com/62338-intelligent-life-on-earth-before-humans.html
Long post
@freemo this is an interesting oiint. I knew that the land masses came together and broke up. Never thought about how many times it had occured before though.
Long post
@n0btc yea we have ideantified 8 major ones, and nearly a dozen more minor ones throughout history.
Thing is pretty much anything we talk about in terms of geological history is usually just from pangea onward. There are 7 whole huge cycles we dotn tend to discuss or have much evidence on.
