Were there advanced civilizations on earth before the human one? the answer for science is no and in this article we will try to understand why science gives such a clear-cut answer to this question and why it leaves so little room for other interpretations.
Let's start by saying that, a civilization , to be defined as such, must meet certain requirements , which become more and more difficult to reach as the technological level of civilization rises.
There is little to say about it, contemporary global civilization is vastly more advanced than any form of human civilization of the ancient world, and this difference is mainly due to the higher technological level achieved in our time compared to the ancient world, but it is linked also to the quality of life, to the spread of ever higher "human rights" and ever more stringent ethical and moral principles, as well as a greater and wider knowledge of the physical phenomena that regulate life and the universe.
Although they may seem very “ advanced to us ", In some fields, some civilizations of the ancient world, and I take for example the Greek civilization in the classical age or the civilization of ancient Egypt , in other fields these populations were very primitive.
The Greek world reached a very high political awareness and Athenian democracy reached such a high level that perhaps, even today, we are not able to match, however the Greeks believed that the world was created by the gods and that those gods governed life, death and the universe. There were enormous social distinctions linked to wealth, and they were based on predetermined and immutable balances, not to mention the idea of slavery, deprivation of individual freedom, the possession of other human beings, conceived as an educational and training tool for foreigners coming from civilizations considered inferior and therefore had to be re-educated. And finally, the energy needs of the Greek civilization was small compared to contemporary civilizations, and this difference in height was dictated by the fact that, the Greek civilization being able to choose between the work of the steam engine and the human one of slaves, preferred the use of slavery .
The energy requirement may seem trivial, but it is one of the most important elements, if not the most important, to define the level of advancement of a civilization, at least according to the Kardašëv scale for the classification of civilizations according to their level technological . This staircase was proposed by Nikolaj Kardašëv in 1964 and classified advanced civilizations on three different levels. Subsequently these levels were expanded and used to define the level of the most advanced civilizations of science fiction works, but remaining at the first three levels, those hypothetically accessible to human civilization, at the first step of this civilization scale are placed those civilizations that are in some way able to use the energy available on its planet, and our civilization still falls into this category, if it has now reached the final stages of the first level and is preparing to reach the second level.
Below level 1 are all other (human) civilizations prior to our industrial revolution , whose main sources of energy were the rivers, the wind and the work of the arms.
At level two of the Kardašëv scale there are those civilizations capable of exploiting all the energy of their solar system, and finally, at level three, there are those civilizations capable of exploiting all the energy of their own galaxy. Obviously we don't know of any real level two or level three civilizations today, and I think it is useless to continue to the next levels.
Having made this premise on the Kardašëv scale and ascertained that human civilization (meaning by human civilization the highest technological level reached by any civilization on our planet) reached level one a little less than two centuries ago, and that all previous civilizations known to us were of level zero, that is civilization in a pre-advanced phase, already gives us an important clue to answer the question posed in the title. / P>
In any case, the conventional theory of the development of civilizations on our planet, supported by numerous researchers is that before human civilization, there were no other forms of advanced civilization on earth and indeed, it is hypothesized that before human civilization on earth there were no was any form of civilization, meaning by civilization something very similar to human civilizations in the last 10,000 years , with the only difference that these hypothetical civilizations preceding the human one belonged to some other undefined living species, terrestrial or non-terrestrial.
In the field of historiography, the absence of traces itself represents a trace, but this is not the case and the fact that no trace has been found of these hypothetical civilizations preceding the human one makes us suspect that actually the human one was the first form of terrestrial civilization.
The most important trace that a civilization leaves behind, it may seem strange, is waste, and the interesting thing is that the more advanced the technological level, the more numerous and difficult to destroy the waste, consequently, if there had been some ancient pre-human civilization on earth, we would have had to find the waste, and so it was not , we have not found ancient pre-human waste.
However, there is a case in which civilizations stop producing waste, and it is when these are hypothetically close to reaching phase two of the Kardašëv scale, as this hypothetical civilization is able to totally convert its waste into energy and this united energy to all the other energy on the planet, it is no longer sufficient to meet the energy needs of that civilization which therefore finds itself having the need to extract energy from the other worlds of its solar system, and it must be said that contemporary human civilization is close to this step which, however, is not yet fully able to complete.
However, , a minimally evolved civilization produces waste and their absence is indicative either of the absence of an ancient evolved civilization or of the presence on earth of an alien, non-terrestrial civilization, which hypothetically had already reached level two or three of the Kardašëv scale.
We know for sure that this last hypothesis makes no sense, but let's pretend we don't know and try to understand if it is actually possible that there were once ancient alien civilizations on earth.
Assuming that a level two or level three civilization arrived on earth, hypothetically to exploit its energy resources, it is easy to deduce that the passage of this civilization on our planet would have left visible traces of their presence, and by traces I mean something very more sophisticated and incisive than some graffiti on rocks in Latin America or pyramid-shaped stone buildings.
If ancient advanced civilizations had set foot on earth we would certainly have found the ruins of ancient hyper-technological cities and above all, we would have noticed a strong reduction, not to mention the absence of energy and mineral resources in the subsoil. After all, these ancient civilizations hypothetically arrived on earth to recover and exploit the raw materials and energy sources of the planet, in this hypothesis it makes no sense the presence of huge deposits of oil, coal, gas, iron, copper, gold , platinum etc etc etc on earth, but these resources as we know are present on the planet and are the basis of our civilization and our technology.
In short, on the scientific, historical, archaeological and anthropological level, there is no doubt, human civilization was the first and only civilization to have developed on earth and to have inhabited the earth.
There is no doubt, there is no possibility, there is no case, there is no trace that can support the theory of the passage on earth of ancient advanced civilizations with a technological level equal to or superior to ours, and there are no traces of the evolution of pre-human terrestrial civilizations, with a technological level equal to that of the human civilizations of the ancient world.