Could an Industrial Civilization Have Predated Humans on Earth?

07-15-2023 • arclein

In the 1968 film Planet of the Apes, a crew of human astronauts travels into the future and lands on an alien planet that a civilization of non-human primates inhabits. Only when the film’s protagonist discovers a half-buried Statue of Liberty on the shore does he realize that this is not an alien world, but rather a future Earth dominated by a new species of intelligent apes that have outcompeted humans. The scene is as provocative today as it was 55 years ago. Homo sapiens, the futurists tell us, may one day be succeeded by another intelligent species. But how do we know another intelligent species didn’t come before us? After all, if civilization had also arisen from an earlier, now-extinct animal species, where are the ruins of its cities? If we found fossils of dinosaurs that lived tens of millions of years ago, we should also have found relics of tombs and temples built in the deep past.