How do we know that there wasn’t an intelligent species living here on earth before humans?
In: Earth Science
Well if there were truly more intelligent humans than our current levels of intelligence, IE: 4th industrial revolution wise, then it stands to reason that we would likely be a lot further along our levels of tech and understanding of the sciences in todays age.
Your question is kind of the wrong way. Rather than trying to prove a negative (i.e. prove something we don’t know) it should be about taking observations, posing a hypothesis based off those observations and how they relate to each other, and then testing that hypothesis. Depending on the data and evidence gathered, either that hypothesis is proved or discarded.
So in this case, the question would really be, “what evidence do you have for the claim that there was earlier intelligent life?”
It can be useful to surmise and postulate beyond observations and evidence, but thought experiments like that aren’t proof of anything. Even though they can lead to new ideas for where to look for evidence, they aren’t proof themselves.
There were. Before home sapiens (humans) there were homo erectus and neanderthals, and before that homo habilis, which was almost 2.8 million years ago. Before that there were Australopithecus who used stone tools over 3 million years ago.
We know this because we’ve found evidence of their tool use, either fossils directly holding tools or things created that could not be done without the use of tools such as stone etchings.
Going back further it depends what you mean by intelligent. I think we largely categorise intelligent life as that which can learn and understand things. A lot of early life would fit into this category. If you’re talking about tool creation and use, which is what gave humans their advantage over other creatures, that’s not solely an intelligence thing but also down to us being lucky and having opposable thumbs.
We don’t know. Like we don’t “know” anything in science. Science never “knows” anything, but rather builds models upon the most rigirious research and the available data. The extend to which we know there wasn’t an intelligent species here before us is that we don’t have any evidence that would point in that direction. And if you don’t have any evidence suggesting anything, its pointless to consider.
For “intelligent life”, that is hard to know for sure. That begins with the problem of defining what “intelligent” even means. Like, do we count whales as intelligent?
But we do know that there has certainly never been an industrial species on Earth that has been anything like us. If there had been, we would have found signs long ago, like layers of plastic in the geological record, or quick changes in the atmospherical composition.
However, the most obvious sign that there never was a human-like species on Earth is this: We have found lots of resources in easily reachable locations, like oil. Then we exploited those, and now we can only find oil several miles below the surface. If there had been an industrial species before us, they would already have exploited all that easily reachable oil (and other resources). This alone shows that, if there has ever been an industrial species in the last 200 million years, it would have been very different from us.
On a side note, this also means that humanity cannot just “start over” after an apocalypse. Whatever civilization follows ours would have very different starting conditions.
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