24 June 2025
By Publisher Ray Carmen :
Imagine digging beneath the layers of Earth’s deep history—not just for fossils or ancient tools, but for signs of a world far older than our own. Not dinosaurs. Not early humans. But another civilisation—technologically advanced, long extinct, and almost entirely erased by the passage of time.
It sounds like science fiction. Yet some serious minds have toyed with the question: What if we’re not the first advanced civilisation on Earth?
This intriguing idea—recently highlighted in a BBC article—has been dubbed the Silurian Hypothesis. Named with a wink to a race of intelligent reptiles from Doctor Who, the theory was explored in a 2018 scientific paper by NASA climate scientist Gavin Schmidt and astrophysicist Adam Frank. Their question was simple, but mind-bending: If an industrial civilisation had existed on Earth millions of years ago, would we even be able to detect it today?
Turns out, maybe not.
Clues Buried Deep
The fossil record is patchy at best. After just a few hundred thousand years, most human-made materials degrade. Even mighty skyscrapers would eventually crumble into dust under relentless geological processes. If another civilisation thrived millions of years ago—say, during the Paleocene epoch—they could have left behind very little that would survive into the present.
Frank and Schmidt suggest we wouldn’t necessarily be looking for physical ruins, but rather for indirect signs—such as unusual chemical signatures in sediment layers, spikes in carbon levels, or anomalies in isotope ratios. In essence, evidence of climate change or industrial activity that doesn’t align with known natural events.
But so far, no smoking gun has been found.
The Limits of the Imagination
The theory isn’t saying an ancient Atlantis actually existed. It’s more of a thought experiment, a way to challenge how we interpret geological and climate records. It also nudges us to consider our own impact: If humanity vanished tomorrow, what would we leave behind? And for how long?
Would alien archaeologists 100 million years from now be able to tell that we were here at all?
A Mirror to Ourselves
Ultimately, the Silurian Hypothesis is less about lost civilisations and more about humility. We tend to think of ourselves as the pinnacle of Earth’s story—but the planet has been spinning for 4.5 billion years. Our chapter could be one of many.
And that raises a sobering possibility: if there was a civilisation before us, perhaps they too reached a technological peak—only to collapse, fade, and be forgotten.
Sound familiar?
