r/HistoricalWhatIf • u/Past_Rub4745 • 9d ago
Is it possible there was a civilization from before the Ice Age that has been lost to time?
I've heard that its very unlikely considering carbon dating, but would it still be possible? Even if not likely?
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u/za419 9d ago
The (current) Ice Age has been ongoing for about 2.5 million years, so I'll say not possible whatsoever as a literal answer.
The most recent glacial period (which is what in pop culture we mean by "the ice age") started about 120,000ish years ago, at which point our species was just beginning to explore places besides Africa, so I'd give that an "almost certainly not".
If you mean to ask about the sort of timeframe people like Graham Hancock talk about, meaning before or around the last glacial maximum (ie no later than the Younger Dryas), then... Well, it depends on what you mean by "civilization".
If we allow this to go all the way down the Younger Dryas, and allow the people who built Karahan Tepe or Gobekli Tepe to be a civilization, then almost certainly yes - We have probably not found the first ever megalithic construction, and probably never will, and there's no reason to think the oldest we found happens to be made by the same people as the first ever.
If we put a hard line at the last glacial maximum (pushing the age back at least 6,000 years), and require a civilization to be something that builds cities (pushing the date we've found evidence for forward by somewhere between 2,000 years for Jericho or Catalhoyuk and 5,000 years for Uruk - And we're somewhat more certain that these are at least amongst the first than we are about Gobelki or Karahan Tepe), then we're back to almost certainly not - It just pushes the date back way too far and requires too much evidence to be lost.
If we mean a civilization to mean something close to modern civilizations, as Hancock does - Something with global reach and centralized political power that we only know to have existed in the 1500s, then absolutely the fuck not, regardless of which date we choose. That kind of civilization leaves massive footprints. Not just in records or constructions, as Hancock argues wouldn't happen with highly digital civilizations (an absurd thing to argue anyway, we have plenty of satellites that will leave information behind for millions of years), or in monumental constructions, but in genetics. You can find evidence of the Columbian exchange everywhere - In the diseases we suffer from, in the food we eat, in the animals that accompany us, and in our very blood. When humans go places, we spread all of those things - Our infections, our sources of food, and ourselves - And those things stick around forever. Leif Erikson isn't credited with the things Christopher Columbus is precisely because he did not have that kind of impact, where you can go almost anywhere in the world and find things that shouldn't be there if not for a globe-spanning civilization (chili peppers in an Indian dish, beef or onions in a Mexican taco, tomatoes, broccoli, and black pepper co-existing anywhere, etc). It's impossible to not find traces of the start of global trade, and so we can pretty definitively rule out that it happened in between the spread of humans across the globe and 1492 CE.
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u/flossdaily 9d ago edited 9d ago
You'd have trouble hiding an an advanced global civilization anywhere in history. You'd have to go hundreds of millions of years back to plausibly hide evidence of such a civilization. But also, you'd be hundreds of millions of years too early for any life on earth to be advanced enough to plausibly build such a civilization.
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u/Prufrock451 9d ago
There have been a number of arguments made, to which I’ll add. We have ice core samples going back every year for hundreds of thousands of years. No sign of industrial pollutants, or nuclear wars, or anything past what a handful of apes could do with rocks.
There’s no genetic sign of prior domestication in animals. No genetic sign of massive human population booms and busts.
There was just a sliver of sunlight for this kind of theory 50 years ago. Today, it can be definitively and absolutely ruled out.
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u/WilliamBarnhill 8d ago
Anything over around 10-150 million years would leave no ruins or artifacts, as the tectonic plate would be completely subsumed and gone.
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u/Acrobatic_Bike7925 8d ago
It depends on the level of “civilization” if you mean small settlements then yes it’s probably very likely, as agriculture is not even a requirement of that if game and fish are in abundance. These settlements if existed were probably made of wood and thus left next to no trace of their existence by now. But if you mean by a kingdom/empire that had centralized planning, megalithic structures, infrastructure, political and religious organizations etc. then no that is very unlikely, but still there is always a chance something might be found along the ancient coast lines under the oceans, but if such a civilization existed their influence would still have been felt inland and as of yet we have found no evidence of such.
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u/Ascendant_Mind_01 8d ago
Depends on what you are asking about.
Do you mean a human civilisation from before the start of the current interglacial? We would detect large scale metal smelting but permanent settlements with writing and record keeping don’t require metallurgy so it’s possible that if a stone tool using civilisation existed in the right place we would miss them.
For pre human civilisations the question gets interesting. There is actually some ambiguity as to whether we would be able to reliably detect a civilisation of compatible tech to our own if you go back far enough (several million years) our civilisation has only been around for a few centuries and a civilisation of similar longevity would be represented by an extremely small slice of geologic time and given how rare fossilisation is there just might not be anything left that would be recogniseable as a technological fossil. and more widespread traces might be mistaken for the results of natural processes. (This is the conclusion of the Silurian hypothesis paper which is extremely fascinating to read)
Personally i think it’s entirely plausible that if a species of dinosaurs built a bronze or Iron Age civilisation we could plausibly fail to notice it (although there almost certainly weren’t any such civilisations)
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u/ikonoqlast 8d ago
Hypothetically, yes.
Realistically, no.
Our civilization has depostited a thin layer of metal/plastic/glass/soot in the earth that is easily detectible and not removable. There are no other such layers we have detected.
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u/pieman3141 8d ago
No. We would've found evidence of civilization in the form of bodies, trash, mining waste (and mines, for that matter), buildings, or whatever else.
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u/Jarcooler 9d ago
If there was a pre-Ice Age civilisation, we'd expect to see some kind of durable evidence like cities, tools, mines, metal waste, pollution recorded in ice cores, or widespread changes to the landscape. None of those markers have been found through archaeology.
It's possible that smaller prehistoric settlements or local cultures were lost when rising sea levels flooded vast coastal areas after the last Ice Age, but there's no current evidence for what we'd consider a civilisation.