Was There An Advanced Civilization Before Humans? | Answers With Joe

on a long enough timeline the survival rate for everything drops to zero that was a quote from the book fight club by chuck palahniuk also was in the movie a nihilist quote from a nihilist work and it's true everything ends eventually every job ends every life ends and yes every civilization ends yeah this is gonna be one of those videos i mean sort of not really we're gonna kind of start there but seriously time is the great devourer of everything and if we're going to get a handle on the subject of this video we've got to first get a handle on the idea of deep time archaeology is the study of past human civilizations many of which we know about some of which have been completely forgotten to time and there's actually a lot of past civilizations that have been completely forgotten to time and time is difficult to see through i mean we do the best we can but we can never really know for sure that we've got it right i mean just look at how our understanding of dinosaurs has changed over the last hundred years i mean now we think that most of them are feathered that changes things but imagine for a second the deep future like long after our civilization has gone and completely forgotten and nobody ever knows we were here probably sounds ridiculous right i mean how could they forget about us look at what all we've built well the tuwana people probably thought the same thing and who were the tuana people you may be asking exactly but imagine you're an archaeologist ten thousand years in the future twenty thousand years whatever and you stumble across harry potter what do you make of that would it like make waves throughout the archaeological world of the future that the people on our time were split into two groups one of which has magical powers actually no books would survive that long even our cities would be ground into dust in that amount of time all they really find is like different kinds of polymers in the ground and remnants of concrete i've actually heard that one of the few things that will actually stand the test of time is mount rushmore because it's in an ecologically stable area and it's carved out of solid granite so you know ten thousand years from now they may find these four faces these weathered faces sticking out from the side of a mountain and decide they must have been gods that we worshiped you know maybe part of our creation myths which i guess they are part of our american myth but that's for another time the point is the further you go back in time the blurrier your vision becomes get enough of it eventually you'll go blind so how do we know i mean really know that we're the first truly advanced civilization on this planet [Music] rome was not built in a day as the saying goes in fact it took hundreds of years for them to steal all our ideas from the greeks and they didn't fall in a day either they lasted 500 years before it was eventually sacked by the visigoths and of course before that they were kind of rotting from the inside before they were conquered from the outside and for those keeping track that's twice as long as the united states has been around luckily we're showing no sign of that rod ourselves so the us has had 240 years rome had about 500 years although the eastern roman empire didn't fall until the 1400s in constantinople and then after that there was the holy roman empire in europe which was neither holy nor roman nor an empire it gets messy but still 500 years is a good run half a millennium but the greeks before them lasted 900 years now they went through a few different eras and changed a bit along the way but still but greece can only stand in awe at the ancient egyptians which lasted for 3 100 years yeah cleopatra lived closer to today than she did to the building of the pyramids that is nuts and just before that were the first known civilizations in mesopotamia the babylonians the assyrians the sumerians and along with that came the first written language so that gets us back to about 3500 bce about 5500 years ago from today and this is basically when civilization started and just to clarify there are some criteria that anthropologists agree on that defines a civilization they need to have urban settlements and not be nomatic there's a division of labor within the settlement there are class structures and governments there should be a surplus of food in artwork trading writing science and technology are prevalent not every civilization gets every single one of these points but those are the basic guidelines all right so we're at 5500 years ago from today and civilizations are starting to rise and they did that mostly because of trade and division of labor you know when you're all on your own you just spend most of your time trying to get food you're just in survival mode you don't have time for anything else but when people start to specialize then you can focus on something else and somebody else can focus on growing your food you know they can specialize in growing food you can specialize in building things making tools making clothes etc and then you can get together and share your wares through a mutual exchange of value and then everybody has things they didn't have before and everybody benefits civilization is based on all people doing their parts and coming together for the good of the community if only there was an analogy to current events in that statement but before people could specialize in growing food we had to develop the technology of agriculture and this took place about 5000 years before the birth of civilization so roughly 8 500 bce or about a little over 10 thousand years ago and this changed everything before that we were just hunter gatherers just constantly trying to find food all the time and in 10 000 years we went from basically foragers and hunter-gatherers to the dominant species controlling all life and resources on the earth so how long did it take to come up with agriculture we found cave art going back 35 000 years we found musical instruments going back 43 000 years and in fact the first anatomically modern humans that we've been able to find are 300 000 years old our entire 10 000 year journey from hunter-gatherers to jaguars running youtube channels took place in only the most recent three percent of the time that homo sapiens has been on this planet it seems like there's plenty of time for this to have happened before at least to some extent who's to say it didn't i feel like i need to pause for a second and clarify there's no evidence that this actually happened or for anything that i'm saying in this video for that matter so who's to say that this didn't happen um maybe the anthropologists that have found no evidence that this has happened this is purely wild speculation more of a thought experiment really but yeah as i said at the beginning the further back you look in time the less clear the picture becomes if our civilization disappeared right now in 10 000 years there'd be almost no proof that we ever existed which ironically is about the same amount of time that it took for us to get here so anyway going back to our timeline if an advanced civilization had existed say here or here or here there will be almost no evidence around for us to find to prove that they ever existed the the chance of it happening is higher than zero is all i'm saying and hey for that matter um does it have to be homo sapiens homo erectus started using fire about a million years ago could they have been smart enough to have formed a civilization of some kind i mean that triples the amount of time that could happen or hey we could keep going in kenya in 2015 they found the oldest stone tools ever found they were 3.3 million years old that increases the amount of time by a factor of ten now there's a few different ways of looking at this one is that you know if it takes a hominid species ten thousand years to become advanced over a three million year timeline then you know it's a statistical probability that it would definitely happen that's one way of looking at it the other is to say that the intelligence just wasn't there you know we hadn't developed enough and it just took that much time for us to get to that point before everything really takes off which again singularity much oh and also in all that time that you could have been born you got born here in this time look at how lucky you are and yet another way to look at it is what possibly in the environment made it possible in the last 10 000 years for us to do this and we did have an uncharacteristically stable climate during this time and that might have helped now before we go back further in time and we will go back further it might behoove us to acknowledge that there have been stories passed on through time of advanced civilizations that were lost to history the most famous one being atlantis plato described atlantis in his book cretius which was one of a series of dialogues he wrote in 360 bce in the book the character crecia said he heard the story of atlantis from his grandfather who had read about it from the athenian statesman solon who was about 300 years before plato's time solon claimed to hear about it from an egyptian priest who said it happened 9 000 years before that i'll save you from doing the math that would put it about 11 600 years ago he described atlantis as an island in the atlantic just past the pillars of hercules which we think is probably the strait of gibraltar which would put it right about here and he described it as being as large as libya and asia minor combined atlantis was said to be an advanced civilization with a powerful government that took over southern europe all the way to italy and northern africa all the way to egypt before it eventually collapsed due to earthquakes and flooding now most historians don't think that atlantis actually existed that plato actually used it as an allegory for a civilization that had fallen apart due to you know corruption and that kind of thing and it was also some good athenian propaganda because it was the athenians that fought back the atlanteans and kept them from taking over the whole of the mediterranean and in the story it was an athenian god that doomed the islands with floods and whatnot and it's controversial even in its own time the historian strabo ridiculed it might have had something to do with the fact that you know athens wouldn't even exist for another 9 000 years but atlantis at its core is a flood myth and there is no shortage of flood myths out there from gilgamesh and ancient sumeria to noah and the abrahamic tradition to northern europe to asia even the americas the idea the story of a flood wiping out civilization and restarting the world is nothing short of ubiquitous isn't this nothing more than a universal trope or is it actually based on something something that happened so far back in our existence that we carried it with us as we spread around the world the author irving finkel used the term heritage memory to describe this phenomenon and he said it might relate to one specific event that happened or it might be an amalgam of flood events that have happened throughout history now interestingly the birthplace of many of these earliest civilizations is around the mediterranean sea which is thought to have been created by a giant flood i mentioned the strait of gibraltar earlier it's a tiny 13-mile gap separating the atlantic ocean and the mediterranean sea it's it's where europe and africa make out or almost make out it's where they they tease each other except once upon a time they totally made out due to tectonic activity and probably some sea level fluctuations due to climate change uh the strait of gibraltar for a while turned into the isthmus of gibraltar is cutting the mediterranean off from the ocean and causing it to dry up for a few million years this was called the missinian salinity crisis the mediterranean basically dried up into a few small very salty lakes but eventually the water crashed through the strait of gibraltar and filled up the mediterranean again in what's known as the zanclean flood this was not some long-term geological time scale thing either the entire mediterranean filled up in a matter of months estimates say that the sea level rose up to 10 meters per day there was a spot near sicily where the water spilled over a sediment deposit causing a mild high waterfall ocean levels around the world actually fell because of this everything about it is epic and obviously any civilization that might have formed in that basin before this would have been wiped out by this flood but this took place about five million years ago and our ancestors were just coming down from the trees at that point which for the purposes of this thought experiment you never know but there is a much more likely candidate in that same area and it took place a lot closer to our timeline and that's the black sea the black sea also known as the mediterranean's mini me is separated from the mediterranean by the bosphorous strait which is the location of modern-day istanbul and it's been theorized on at least two occasions the phosphorus pulled a gibraltar and closed up when this happened it would have formed a much smaller inland sea uh freshwater lake really fed by glacier water from the nearby caucus mountains you know fresh water that you could drink might be a nice place to set up a city state or two well one theory by william ryan and walter pittman in 1997 suggested that around 7 500 years ago roughly 5 500 bce water spilled over the isms separating the black sea from the mediterranean creating the bosphorus strait and flooding the lake the water would have spilled into the area with a force of 200 niagara falls and flooded a hundred thousand square kilometers of land and another theory by andre l chapalgia suggests that a similar flooding event may have happened between 17 000 and 14 000 years ago triggered by the end of the late glacial maximum this one has an excess of melt water from glaciers flooding the caspian sea to the east and then spilling over into the black sea via the magnets river now there is some evidence supporting these theories but it's heavily debated because i mean let's face it they're mostly attempts to try to prove the noah's story true but there are a lot of flood myths and stories around lost ancient civilization so it's not the craziest idea i mean it's not like i'm saying it's aliens or anything let's get back to our timeline shall we when we left off we were talking about the oldest stone tools that were found about 3.3 million years ago that would put us about in the time of australopithecus afarensis the famed lucy skeleton between then and now there were multiple hominid species that came up and were around for hundreds of thousands of years maybe one of the most successful ones is homo erectus it was actually it actually got started 1.89 million years ago and they didn't go away until after humans came on the scene homo sapiens so they lasted nine times longer than we have so far homo erectus wasn't too dissimilar from us you know they they cooked food they took care of their elderly and infirm they built shelters used tools may have had a language we don't know is it possible they were able to achieve something resembling a civilization in nearly two million years i mean if we were able to do it in only ten thousand i mean is it really impossible to think that there might have been homo erectus city-states with their own cultures and laws and organization that traded with each other now let's be clear i'm not saying that happen there's certainly no evidence to show that it happened and clearly time is not the only factor here i mean chimps and gorillas were around in all that time and nobody says that planet of the apes actually happened clearly there's a physiological intelligence threshold that has to be met and we don't know if homo erectus met that threshold or not we assume they didn't we assume the same for all the hominid species that came before them so that could be the end of our thought experiment but where's the fun in that because if you expand this timeline to include the history of life in this planet going back 600 million years everything that we've covered so far barely even registers could there have possibly been an earlier mammalian species that took over the planet after the dinosaurs ended 60 million years ago or to keep going back even further could there have been a dino species or a reptilian species that became intelligent and created a bit of a civilization how would we know well there's the fossil record obviously but one of the biggest headaches for paleontologists is that the fossil record is a crazy incomplete catalog of the life that came before us the fact of the matter is only certain conditions can create a fossil for example they have to be buried rapidly to avoid decomposition they have to be enclosed in some kind of sediment that can harden and protect the skeleton and also has to have the right chemical composition to turn bone into rock over millions of years really most animals that have ever existed didn't fossilize so what else could you look for this was a question put forth by adam frank and gavin schmidt in the 2018 paper in the international journal of astrobiology titled the silurian hypothesis would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in the geological record the paper was asking how we could detect if an industrial civilization had existed on earth millions of years before our own time with their definition of an industrial civilization being the ability to harness external energy sources at global scales and they named the silicon hypothesis after a reptilian species and doctor who i'm saying that like you guys aren't nerds that are way ahead of me and in the paper they speculated that the best way to answer this question is to imagine how we might be found if our civilization collapsed again what would archaeologists find if they look back from you know millions of years in the future besides harry potter and what they would find as i was kind of speculating before would be aberrations in the geologic record aberrations like plastic polymers and rare earth metals and fertilizers but there's one marker that would undeniably be from an industrial civilization that had been able to use energy at global scales and that's fossil fuel residue fossil fuel residue meaning carbon so if you found an abundance of carbon in a similar geological layer all around the world that might be evidence of mass consumption of fossil fuels but how do you know it's not from volcanic eruptions you might be asking well that's where the seuss effect comes in no not dr seuss though that would be awesome the seuss effect actually has to do with carbon isotopes all right so carbon comes in three naturally occurring isotopes c12 c13 and c14 the numbers corresponding with the number of particles in its nucleus 99 of carbon in the atmosphere is c12 and that's a good thing because that's what plants like because it's the lighter isotope they would not could not like it heavy seuss reference plants and photosynthetic algae absorb all that c12 and then they over time become fossil fuels like oil and coal and then when we burn those and pump it back out into the atmosphere the level of c12 in the atmosphere rises this shift in the c12 ratio is known as the seuss effect and that's one of the data points that show us that this rise in carbon dioxide that we're seeing right now is coming from fossil fuels and not something else and our fictional archaeologists for millions of years in the future would see that in their rocks and they would know that we were here and that we were advanced so with that in mind is there anything in our current geological record that might indicate that something like that had happened before well according to the paper yeah maybe it was a period about 56 million years ago known as the paleocene eocene thermal maximum or petm and it was a period of time where the temperature of the earth rose by nine degrees celsius it was hardly any ice in the entire planet and the carbon and oxygen isotope ratios look about like what we might expect us to look like in the far future and this has kicked off a lot of speculation about ancient civilizations and lizard people which probably wasn't helped by the fact that it was actually named after a lizard species and doctor who and it's certainly an interesting thought experiment but the authors of this paper don't actually think that the petm was caused by an ancient civilization because the rise in the c-12 ratio took place over hundreds of thousands of years whereas we've been able to raise it that same amount in only a couple hundred years so it's different and by different i mean terrifying but that apparently is the cost of civilization in order to build a civilization you have to harness energy from the planet and that affects resources as the authors wrote in an article in the atlantic there is no free lunch you can't power a global civilization without some degree of impact on the planet someday in the far far future our entire civilization will be nothing more than a layer of rock in the ground and mount rushmore and i have to wonder when our fictional future archaeologist finds that layer will he wonder what happened to us or will it be obvious and when that archaeologist is doing his work we can only hope that he's wearing comfortable underwear while he's doing it that's why today's sponsor is mack weldon mack wilden makes the most comfortable underwear you will ever put on your tinder bits and the reason why i feel comfortable saying that is because they actually designed their own fabric to be as comfortable as possible they created a few different types of fabric actually one of them they call their their silver 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Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 1,856,854

Rating: 4.794373 out of 5

Keywords: answers with joe, joe scott, ancient civilizations, silurian hypothesis, zanclean flood, homo erectus, lost civilizations, atlantis, deep time, black sea deluge

Id: xtJ49gXWwA0

Length: 21min 55sec (1315 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 20 2020