“As the 21st century began, human evolution was at a turning point. Natural selection, the process by which the strongest, the smartest, the fastest, reproduced in greater numbers than the rest, a process which had once favored the noblest traits of man, now began to favor different traits. Most science fiction of the day predicted a future that was more civilized and more intelligent. But as time went on, things seemed to be heading in the opposite direction. A dumbing down. How did this happen? Evolution does not necessarily reward intelligence. With no natural predators to thin the herd, it began to simply reward those who reproduced the most, and left the intelligent to become an endangered species.” – Idiocracy
SUNDAY! SUNDAY! SUNDAY! The Iowa Assassin versus the Green Skinned Lizard Killer from Zontar-A. Let the match begin! Your ticket gives you the full chair, but you’ll only need the edge of your seat!
The Silurian Hypothesis is a simple one: humans may not be the first intelligent inhabitants of Earth. Dr. Adam Frank, astrophysicist at the University of Rochester and Dr. Gavin Schmidt, director of the NASA® (pronounced NAY-Saw) Goddard Institute, a division of Tesla® framed and named this discussion formally. Put simply, the idea is that there might have been another civilization on Earth before people. Like way before people – little to none of the current surface of the Earth is older than about four million years old, so the only organism alive today that might have seen the world before that time is your Mom. Because she’s old.
It really can’t be said that Frank and Schmidt came up with the idea, because they named it after a Dr. Who™ episode where lizard people from the Silurian age showed up in 1974 Great Britain because they overslept their suspended animation alarm clock. Spoiler alert (for a 48 year old television series) humanity killed all the lizard people.
And Dr. Who did feel kinda guilty about committing genocide against an entire race, at least until the next episode where he had to fight the Scantily Clad Women of Zetar 9 armed only with tanning lotion and Piña Coladas.
But if there had been a civilization that existed before present time, back in the deep history of Earth, how, exactly would you even find it? The Earth’s surface turns over on a regular basis – one article I read said that no part of the Earth’s surface is older than about 4 million years. What Frank and Schmidt wrote a paper about wasn’t about the speculation if there had been intelligent life before humanity since that question has been out for at least 100 years. No, their paper was what evidence might exist that we could use to determine if there had been an ancient, intelligent, pre-human civilization.
And it turns out it’s not very easy to determine if an intelligent species might have lived on the Earth long ago. Four million years is a long time, but the dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago, and managed to be the dominant lifeform on Earth for 165 million years before that. The age of the dinosaurs began almost a quarter of a billion years ago. Again, not as old as your Mom, but still a very long time ago.
And that’s the point. Four million years is a very, very long time. When I start to think about human artifacts that would last that long the first thing that comes to mind is bricks, pottery, and glass. But, again, 4 million years ago is a very, very long time.
Even farther back, there was a great inland sea over the middle part of the United States. And then formation of the Rocky Mountains, at 55 million to 80 million years ago. That amount of time doesn’t even take us halfway back to the start of the dinosaurs, which were by any measure the most successful land lifeform ever, even before being reincarnated in the toy box and imagination of every 7 year old boy.
Here’s the Jurassic world, thankfully with 100% less movie.
So was there enough time for an intelligent civilization to form? Sure.
But civilization doesn’t mean sophisticated, and it doesn’t mean technological. Just like there are ranges of steak (from Awesome to Super Awesome) there are ranges of civilization, from hunter gatherers at the low end, all the way up to super-galactic alien empire at the high end.
Challenges of a civilization:
- Brain Complexity – This is the big Kahuna, the large cheese. Without enough complexity in the brain, the behaviors required to create a civilization simply are not there. Birds flock based on instinct, but true civilization requires more than instinct – it requires the ability to create technology and worth together in conscious, novel ways. Based on the human evolution timeline, it looks like this level of evolutionary change requires about 4 million years, a number we’ve already talked about today. Coincidence?
- Available Energy – We can have the smartest beings that have ever lived on the planet, but if they don’t have sufficient available energy in the form of fossil fuels or fission, the highest level of technology that they will be able to reach is approximated by the Roman Empire. And, yes, the Roman Empire had some pretty cool tech – they could drink cold beer in an air-conditioned house. But space flight, electronic computers, plastics, and streaming Netflix™ movies were quite beyond them. Was there oil available to kick start this hypothetical past civilization? Oil has been formed throughout time, and, yeah, if our hypothetical civilization went looking, they might have found it.
- Environment – My initial thought had been that the climate needed to be stable enough for an intelligence to form. But is that right? I don’t think so. Based on the one and only case of intelligent life we know of (us, silly), I’ve changed that opinion. Human evolution leading to intelligence has taken place during a period of significant climactic instability. Is it possible that the ice ages didn’t inhibit human civilization, but in fact were the reason for humans developing intelligence? Is there a similar stress during the time of the dinosaurs? Yes! You can see at least one stressful climate event. Yay, climate change!
See the “ice age” 150 million years ago?
It’s been suggested that there were several candidate species of dinosaurs that were developing along the lines of an intelligent species – they walked on two legs, they had thumbs, had a fairly large brain, and were called Troodon (which is an amazingly lame dinosaur name). Dale Russell was the scientist who discovered Troodon, and pretty quickly asked the question (after a few shots of tequila), “Hey, how close was this thing to becoming sentient?”
Here is a sculpture of Troodon (in the back) and a hypothetical evolutionary ancestor, the Dinodude.
It had a big brain for a dinosaur, and, given a few million years, the kind of time it took for humans to evolve from some sort of pinheaded monstrosity that could barely discern red wine from white to statuesque blonde girls with beer at Oktoberfest. A more in depth look at Russell’s story can be found here (LINK).
Still far cuter than an Australopithecus afarensis, even if you shaved it.
So, if this precursor intelligence existed (a big if) why haven’t we found them?
The biggest reason is that, based on the paleoclimate graph above, my bet is that they would have existed 150 million years ago. From a civilization that spends a collective 4 billion hours each year looking for car keys, I’m not really hopeful that we’d find an entire lost civilization that existed before iPhones®. Let’s face it – dinosaurs were everywhere for 165 million years, and what do we have to show for it? A few, (very few) bones, some bugs in amber, and all of the plastic straws that the dinosaurs left everywhere.
Okay, seriously, what would we be looking for? A greasy ash layer? DinoDirecTV® satellites in geosynchronous orbit?
Well, sorry, that satellite idea won’t work. Even a geosynchronous satellite (one that orbits at exactly the same speed that Earth rotates at) decays over time as itty-bitty space dust hits it. And if you’ve got a few million years to spare? Not a problem, the satellite will spiral down into a fiery death over some ancient ocean.
A greasy ash layer? Well, despite McDonald’s hamburgers being impervious to time, ash happens all over the place for tons of reasons. But what if warring dinodudes decided to have a nice, cozy nuclear war? What would you see? Well, lots of uranium in the sediment. None of the other byproducts would have lasted this long, but the uranium 235 has a half-life of 700 million years, so it would have. So, I did a Google® search for “uranium deposit sedimentary Jurassic” and it turns out that that lots and lots of uranium exists in sedimentary rocks, especially in Colorado and in Thailand.
Proof of a past nuclear war? Probably not. Most all of the Uranium that exists is the “fun” uranium 238 that you give to kids to play with, and not the uranium 235 which puts the boom in bomb. So, to find proof, you’d need a higher amount of uranium 235 than expected. I guess I could prove all of that myself, but I’d have to do a lot more research, and probably spend a lot of time in third world countries (like Utah where you can’t even get decent booze) doing research and sweating collecting samples in dusty holes. There are SO many jokes I’m not going to make right now.
So, that’s the first place I’d look – high concentrations of uranium 235 outside of ore bodies in sedimentary rock, and at least one USGS paper indicated some excess 235, but probably not our ancient dinodudes. But if they never figured nuclear bomb making out, what then?
The best place to look for evidence would be the Moon. It doesn’t have active geology, like Earth, and, outside of the constant bombardment from meteors, at least any evidence of visitation would still be on the surface, though irradiated by the Sun’s raw rays for millions of years. But spaceflight is hard, arguably harder than making nuclear weapons.
It might be nearly impossible to find them if they didn’t make nuclear weapons or travel to space. Heck, if you were a coal miner and found a gold dinodude ring in the coal? Off into your pocket. Would you believe it if you were a paleontologist and found a dinodude’s five pound gold crown? Who would you tell?
Would you work to establish (against all the ridicule that science could bring to bear) that a former culture existed that has never even been hinted at, 150 million years in the past. Or, you could pop that crown in your pocket and walk away. (I picked gold because, uniquely, if you dropped a five pound gold crown or golden statue of Johnny Depp’s hair on the ground, unless it was mashed or melted it would still look exactly the same a billion years from now. Gold doesn’t rust, it doesn’t tarnish. It’s awesome.)
I’m not saying that there’s been either a coordinated (unlikely) or individual (more likely) decision to hush up findings. I am saying that no sane paleontologist would mess up his tenure track position at State U to bring up a theory that involved an unknown culture that no other academic has ever even speculated about? No academic has incentive to do this.
I’m not sure that intelligence is all that important for an evolutionary trait. My main evidence? Where is another species that’s intelligent? That uses tools? That has language? Oh, sure, the most likely case is that we would have killed them if we found them, but they don’t seem to exist.
My theory is that intelligence only gets you so far, and will only develop under extreme situations.
What? Intelligence isn’t important?
Well, it is. Again, to a point. The cunning of a wolf. The keenness of a fox. The smarts of a squid (squid are smart, and tasty). But I’m not sure that it helps a lot if any of them can study Nietzsche or Seneca or Shakespeare. Heck, it would probably be a net survival deficit for a Fox in Socks to Quote Shakespeare on Rocks.
This will (probably) be a future blog post, but there is evidence that, even among humans that the optimum IQ for social and economic performance is somewhere between 115 and no more than 130. No more than.
So, if a Jurassic reptile from 150,000,000 years ago shows up with an 800 IQ and starts talking? Feel free to make fun of him. Meanwhile, here’s that picture of the Oktoberfest girls again:
