Is it possible there was a civilization in the past on Earth on par with (or in excess of) our current level of...

...

yes, but we also left quite a footprint, so heavy in fact that you will beable to pinpoint it with geological means in the future.
A human civilisation would be too recent and the remains to visible to not know it.
However, if it is more than 2-300 million years ago, so non human, then it would be possible to go unnoticed.

Basically this >be hunter gatherers for hundreds of thousands of years
>someone, somewhere develops a system resembling modern agriculture
>suddenly they have a surplus of food
>populations of any species fluctuate to meet the supply of food they have available
>their population skyrockets
>new problems arise with higher population (more resources needed: land to cultivate more food, materials for housing, etc.)
>conflict starts with neighbors
>need for technology develops to meet these challenges

And then it rapidly grew from there

modern behavioral humans didnt exist until 50k years ago.
And humans existing in stuff more complicated than a village didn't happen until roughly 10k years ago.

"Technological advance is an inherently iterative process. One does not simply take sand from the beach and produce a Dataprobe. We use crude tools to fashion better tools, and then our better tools to fashion more precise tools, and so on. Each minor refinement is a step in the process, and all of the steps must be taken."
Chairman Sheng-ji Yang, "Looking God in the Eye"

Holy fuck please kill yourself people like you who can't comprehend the idea of other people not thinking the same way as you are the reason why this world is so shit

>I always struggled to understand how come we, homo(s) (sapiens) were around for 250k years, yet only in the last 10k years we've achieved something (tech, pyramids, writing etc).

Because it first of all wasn't necessary. Technology only becomes a reality once it's necessary.

Think about it; if you live in a cold climate, it makes sense to create clothes and clothes are a form of technology created to shield you from the temperature.

But if it's always warm, what's the point of clothes exactly?

No.

If we have evidence of life 400 million years ago we'd have evidence of civilisations with advanced technology

Not all men lived in a cold climate...

the kind of trash our kind of civilization produces takes really fucking long time to disappear

Phase transitions bro

>yes, but we also left quite a footprint, so heavy in fact that you will beable to pinpoint it with geological means in the future.

Doesn't this just mean a past civilization not as stupid as us could've existed with technology that didn't leave footprints?

Very much possible, yes.

yes and not all men create supercomputers?

look at poly/micronesians.
>abundant fish and vegetation means no need for agriculture
>islands can only sustain small populations
>islands are isolated from others, no large societies, no large conflicts, and no technology needed to meet population / economic growth
>basically everyone just spends all day being comfy, banging each other, and making art
>haven't technologically advanced without outside influence in like 10,000 years

The so-called "PIE people".

Antediluvian civilization was pretty based. Plus, it's neat hearing about he erosion marks on the sphinx. Considering that they would denote an age around 36k years ago.

That and Gobekli Tepe is past 12k years ago. There are a couple of other anomalies. I mean, after we're gone for about 600 years it'd be hard to find much of a trace of our presence. Things decay fairly quickly.

>after we're gone for about 600 years it'd be hard to find much of a trace of our presence. Things decay fairly quickly.

bretty spooky desu senpai

It's definitely possible, perhaps even likely, that there were earlier civilizations than those known to modern historians.

But it's unlikely that any of them made it past Renaissance-era technology. If an industrialized civilization had existed in the distant past, even if all its ruins were lost, we would still notice them indirectly through localized depletion of non-renewable resources.

When one observes eroded parts of cathedrals they look simply like typical stone ruins. It makes you wonder what type of masonry could have existed. Given that these cathedrals seem to wither away quite quick.

Graham Hancock's Magicians of the Gods might be up your alley OP, the thesis is that advanced civilization existed and that a comet wiped it out 12,000 years ago.

He didn't argue they were on par with or in excess of us, though. And personally I found most of his arguments were too heavily based on supposition. Still, he draws attention to lots of neat stuff in regards to archaeology and ancient cataclysm myths.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_Hancock

>He revealed that until relatively recently he had maintained a 24-year-long daily cannabis habit during which he was “stoned for 16 hours a day”, and had suffered from rages and paranoia as a result. Hancock said he had been successfully cured by an experience with ayahuasca in South America, during which he experienced an arduous life-review by the Amerind spirit “Mother Ayahuasca”.

kek

The guy comes off as a total fuckwit and I went into his book with complete cynicism, and I'd just been reading it for a laugh. Some of his theories I find to be ridiculous (I don't buy his idea of "atlantis basically existed") but some of the stuff he brings up to try and establish his argument is interesting food for thought. He offers a pretty neat complication of ancient cataclysm myths, and brings up a lot of neat aspects of archaeology and how many sites might be older than we thought. I think his criticism of academic orthodoxy getting stiffing is fair, even if he pushes it to a bit of a stupid extent sometimes.

The problem is the retarded elements have the tendency to make people dismiss 100% of what he says, which is a bit of a shame. I'd basically say "pirate it if you can find it around and give it a skim."

>He offers a pretty neat complication of ancient cataclysm myths

I meant to say compilation.

Well, you missed the fact that poly/micronesians had really fucking advanced navigational and sailing practices.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polynesian_navigation
This kinda drives home the fact that culture, somewhat like biological evolution, serves to adapt to an environment in a somewhat hackish manner. Just like humanity is not the final word of evolution, western civilization is not the final word of culture. There are millions of ways culture can speciate, but given current circumstances, it is the most adaptable. There seemingly seems to a sort of "drive" for cultural evolution, some sort of mantra which acts to guide future variation, in western civilization this is certainly technological innovation. Perhaps even, rapidly speciating culture is likely the hallmark of humanity, earlier hominins had some archaic form of culture (much like modern chimpanzees), but stagnation was generally what you would see for the majority of the existence of these cultures. Therefore, there is certainly an evolutionary advantage towards rapidly speciating culture, it likely serves as a mechanism for quickly adapting to new environments, and probably accounts for our near exponential rise in technological innovation.

Our current civilization has covered most of the arable land on the planet in farms, and had such a dramatic effect on the flora and fauna that we're considered another extinction event.

So if a civilization existed that was on our scale, we would probably notice them first from all of the extinct species and all the forests that suddenly disappear at one particular time period.

Right; and once they - thousands of years ago, using literal stone-age technologies - reached something that worked for them, they left well enough alone and the pinnacle of their civilization would still be catamarans and stellar navigation that takes decades to learn if the rest of the world hadn't crashed their party. That was the point the person you're replying to was making.

No no no no no.

>abundant fish and vegetation means no need for agriculture
Poly/Micronesians were both 99% agriculturalists and fisherman.
>islands can only sustain small populations
Many of the larger volcanic islands had populations in the 100,000s
>islands are isolated from others, no large societies, no large conflicts, and no technology needed to meet population / economic growth
Not true, inter island trade was extensive. Somoans and Tongans would sail several hundred miles to go to war with each other.
>basically everyone just spends all day being comfy, banging each other, and making art
Typically they would spend the first several hours of the day farming. Then nap during the heat of the day. But you are correct the lifestyle was quite comfy.
>haven't technologically advanced without outside influence in like 10,000 years
The Polynesians expanded out about 3000 years ago and developed a number of agricultural improvements but after they stopped because they had no need to.