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00:00 The Earth is 4.5 billion years old.
00:04 Modern humans are 300,000 years old.
00:08 For the very vast majority of the time that this planet has existed, we haven't been
00:14 here.
00:15 So, what else was happening?
00:18 What else could life on Earth have produced?
00:22 This is Unveiled, and today we're answering the extraordinary question, was there a pre-human
00:29 civilization on Earth?
00:32 Do you need the big questions answered?
00:35 Are you constantly curious?
00:37 Then why not subscribe to Unveiled for more clips like this one, and ring the bell for
00:42 more thought-provoking content.
00:44 Here's the thing, the timeline of Earth as a whole isn't actually that well-known.
00:51 Scientists and archaeologists can look at layers of rock, strata, to travel back through
00:56 what's known as deep time, to try to understand what might have come before.
01:03 But it's not exactly an exact discipline.
01:07 With every stratum of geological matter, there's always the chance that something incredible,
01:13 solid and undeniable may be dug up.
01:18 But the research rarely falls that way.
01:21 Instead, academics on the ground and in the lab are tasked with trying to make sense of
01:28 often tiny fragments of history, where most of what once surrounded it has been whittled
01:34 down and eroded away.
01:37 Since the advent of radiocarbon dating, we have at least achieved a greater-than-ever
01:42 level of accuracy in positioning what we find on the timeline of "stuff that came before
01:49 us" up to a point.
01:51 But the business of archaeology, of delving far, far further into the past than written,
01:58 recorded history allows us to go, is still somewhat shrouded in mystery.
02:04 It's perhaps unsurprising, then, that many have asked a variation on the same question.
02:11 How do we know what came before us?
02:15 Or how do we know that an intelligent "something" didn't come before us?
02:21 With so many literal billions of years stretching out from our time back to the beginning of
02:27 time on this planet, and with so much of that essentially unaccounted for, can we ever be
02:34 certain that we really are the most advanced life that Earth has ever seen?
02:40 According to some, mostly alternate theorists rather than mainstream academics, no, we probably
02:47 can't.
02:48 Arguably the most famous exploration of this is the Silurian Hypothesis, put forward in
02:54 a 2018 paper by the astrophysicist Adam Frank and the NASA Earth scientist Gavin Schmidt.
03:01 We've taken a dive into the Silurian way of thinking in another previous video, so
03:05 be sure to check that out after this, but for now, here's the recap.
03:10 First off, the term "Silurian" is taken directly from a race of alien creatures in the long-running
03:17 BBC sci-fi series Doctor Who, which offers some indication of where we're going here.
03:24 Broadly, the hypothesis argues that direct evidence of a pre-human civilization from,
03:31 say, 350 million years ago or prior, i.e. before the dinosaurs, would more than likely
03:39 no longer exist.
03:41 While it perhaps doesn't feel like it whenever you're exploring a museum that's packed
03:45 with bones, definitely identifiably fossilized remains are actually quite a rare thing, and
03:53 the further back in history you travel, the rarer they become.
03:58 This is due to a number of factors, including the effects of Earth's atmosphere, erosion,
04:04 the near-total exposure of Earth's surface, and due to our planet's tectonic activity.
04:11 Earth is essentially always recycling itself, and while this is a process that literally
04:17 does take millions of years, we have many millions of years to play with on a planet
04:24 that's 4.5 billion years old.
04:28 In short, none, or very, very little of Earth's topmost accessible layers, the crust and the
04:35 surface, have been here for even half of its lifetime, or a quarter, let alone for the
04:41 whole entire show.
04:43 All manner of stuff has been lost along the way, so why not the evidence of some long-dead-but-once-advanced
04:51 civilization as well?
04:53 For Frank and Schmidt, perhaps our only hope would be in searching for indirect signs that
04:59 something was here, if indeed anything was ever here.
05:05 And here, again, is where that element of mystery inevitably takes root, because instead
05:12 of clear and direct artifacts, things you'd actually see and hold, there would likely
05:19 be only secondary traces of what came before.
05:24 This means things like chemical imbalances in soil to suggest a sustained period of global
05:30 warming possibly brought on by industrialization, or deeply buried traces of still radioactive
05:38 nuclear waste from a previous nuclear age long, long before our current one.
05:45 Neither of those things would constitute a smoking gun, irrefutable proof that something
05:50 really was here before us.
05:53 But should we find something like weird soil or ancient nuclear material, then questions
06:01 could be raised.
06:03 So have we found anything like that up until now?
06:07 With nuclear waste, the answer is no, or at least nothing that we've identified.
06:14 And in fact, we're only just beginning to wrestle with the exact opposite end of that
06:18 conundrum, how to properly dispose of the nuclear waste that we've created in order
06:25 to ensure that any future group after us don't accidentally dig it all back up.
06:31 It's a niche but interesting field, involving, among other things, research into what kinds
06:37 of symbols would work universally, even thousands of years into the future, to warn any unsuspecting
06:43 society away from any location that had, for us, served as a nuclear waste dump.
06:51 With investigations into unusual soil traces, however, there are some suggestions that we
06:58 might already know of some contenders, and actually, from not that long ago at all, relatively
07:06 speaking.
07:07 The Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis is perhaps one of the most controversial alternate theory
07:13 theories of modern times.
07:16 The Younger Dryas itself is a mostly uncontested global cooling event around 12,900 years ago.
07:25 Research has shown that, for whatever reason, temperatures on Earth did drop at that time.
07:31 The Impact Hypothesis is then the thornier issue, as it argues that the cool-off was
07:38 caused by a long-term and significant shower of asteroid material, striking all across
07:46 North and South America and Asia at roughly the same time.
07:51 As evidence, advocates claim that soil samples reveal materials and measures consistent with
07:58 an asteroid strike, although conventional science has never concurred.
08:04 That said, there isn't a universally agreed-upon conventional explanation either.
08:10 The Younger Dryas is still something of a mystery, and so, perhaps predictably, there
08:16 have been some efforts made to connect it to some form of ancient civilization that
08:22 mainstream history doesn't acknowledge.
08:26 The Scottish writer Graham Hancock is a leading advocate for the Impact Theory.
08:31 While some that follow it have further mused that the supposed asteroid may have been what
08:37 kick-started human civilization as we know it today, with environmental changes all over
08:42 the world leading to the mass end of hunter-gatherer lifestyles and the near total uptake of settled,
08:50 farming communities.
08:51 Again, mainstream science almost universally considers the Impact Hypothesis to be unfounded
08:58 pseudoscience.
08:59 What's bizarre, however, is that there are other, far more outlandish theories out
09:06 there too, arguing that if today's human traits came to the fore just a few thousand
09:12 years ago, travel back millions of years, and we could, potentially, find something
09:18 that's truly and significantly different.
09:22 Writing for The Atlantic in 2019, Peter Brannan outlines one especially eye-opening thought
09:28 experiment as a means to demonstrate his view that human civilization isn't its own
09:34 epoch on the timeline of Earth.
09:37 As many contemporary models claim, it's merely a fleeting event.
09:42 Brannan asks us to consider the end of the dinosaurs and how much we can ever truly know
09:49 about what happened during this period.
09:52 He writes, "If, in the final 7,000 years of their reign, dinosaurs became hyper-intelligent,
09:59 built a civilization, started asteroid mining, and did so for centuries, and if they did
10:05 all that before missing the asteroid that would ultimately kill them, then we would
10:11 never know.
10:12 According to Brannan, it would be virtually impossible to tell."
10:17 Now this is presented as a thought experiment only.
10:22 Brannan never suggests that it was what he really thinks might have happened.
10:26 But what's your verdict on the principles behind what he's saying?
10:31 Not even the most long-lasting nuclear remnants would or could remain for the 65 million years
10:38 post-dinosaurs on Earth.
10:41 While again, analysis of geological strata can only tell us so much, we are essentially
10:48 certain based on fossil records that the dinosaurs could never have evolved in this way and would
10:55 never have needed to.
10:57 But the truth is that there are always massive portions of history, tens of thousands, even
11:04 millions of years, that we simply cannot account for in any kind of detail.
11:10 And so, we're back to the same old feeling of encountering a massive and unending mystery.
11:18 Was there a pre-human civilization on Earth?
11:22 So far, there's nothing by the way of conclusive evidence to suggest that, yes, there was.
11:28 But perhaps the question taps into a much broader, more complete line of entry.
11:35 Because can we ever really know exactly what happened on our planet before us?
11:41 Could we ever hope to accurately timeline everything that took place pre-human?
11:47 The answer here is no.
11:50 The complete history of the world is just far too great.
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