• Civilization before Humanity - Could it have existed?
    68 replies, posted
[QUOTE=_Kent_;42078436]It depends on what else the animal has. We don't have sharp teeth or claws, we are slow as fuck, and we have poor hearing and smell. We could probably survive without intelligence in extremely small numbers in a specific niche, but because of our intelligence there are now almost 8 billion of us.[/QUOTE] I think you're missing what I said. Animals without significant intelligence are already capable of doing these things based on their surroundings. Anticipating predators and finding mates are feats done by all organisms, and most species of animals do a much better job of conserving resources than we humans do. It's a matter of simple biology. Intelligence (or rather simply agriculture followed by intelligence some would argue) has allowed humanity to dominate the globe, but it doesn't benefit basic survival.
I truly have to say there has been no significant civilization before us, on this planet, I do not think so anyway based on what we've gathered so far. If you look at the amount of [i]stuff[/i] we've created or made as a civilization, you will know that some of that stuff is going to stick around for probably even longer than us. Satellites in the orbit or even today's ancient ruins and shit, and we haven't come across anything like that before.
[QUOTE=_Kent_;42072419]If the civilization had invented styrofoam or other plastics, we should have picked up the chemical traces of it by now. Otherwise, as has been said earlier, a more primitive civilization could go unnoticed, especially if it was an oceanic species, seeing that oceanic crust recycles itself much more quickly than continental crust.[/QUOTE] Would need to be a significantly less advanced civilisation. Take into account that we'd probably start finding large congregrations of fossils in fairly small areas and possibly a lot more stuff. If there was such a civilisation it would probably have to be a hunter gatherer or exist fairly spread out. Now of course it's possible for these civilisations to have existed, but that's closer to asking if intelligence on a higher level existed in the past. [QUOTE=Derubermensch;42081313]I think you're missing what I said. Animals without significant intelligence are already capable of doing these things based on their surroundings. Anticipating predators and finding mates are feats done by all organisms, and most species of animals do a much better job of conserving resources than we humans do. It's a matter of simple biology. Intelligence (or rather simply agriculture followed by intelligence some would argue) has allowed humanity to dominate the globe, but it doesn't benefit basic survival.[/QUOTE] Actually the reason we are bad at it now, is because we don't need it. You don't have to plan for worse years because the chance that there will be any is very low. But if you look into the past or even into basic stuff like coppicing forests you'll basically find out that we are amazing at conserving stuff. Just the fact that we can cook and cure meat is an insane advantage given to humans by intelligence.
Humanity is unique in the fact that unlike everything else on this planet it does not form an equilibrium, and our actions also spoil the balance of nature in many places too. We split from monkeys and then further from that. And then thanks to using our brains and developing weapons and tools we killed off some of the competing hominids eventually driving all but homo sapiens extinct.
[QUOTE=ViralHatred;42092703]Humanity is unique in the fact that unlike everything else on this planet it does not form an equilibrium, and our actions also spoil the balance of nature in many places too.[/quote] What balance of nature? What does that concept even mean? [quote]We split from monkeys and then further from that. And then thanks to using our brains and developing weapons and tools we killed off some of the competing hominids eventually driving all but homo sapiens extinct.[/QUOTE] We didn't drive them extinct. Most hominid species died independently of each other.
[QUOTE=Sobotnik;42093478]What balance of nature? What does that concept even mean? We didn't drive them extinct. Most hominid species died independently of each other.[/QUOTE] it's true that Native Americans were able to form a natural equilibrium with the animal population i think he's referring to pollution and the destruction of the environment
[QUOTE=_jesterk;42093869]it's true that Native Americans were able to form a natural equilibrium with the animal population i think he's referring to pollution and the destruction of the environment[/QUOTE] Indians were actually quite terrible at managing their environments. They managed to help drive all of the Megafauna to extinction (including horses). When they adopted agriculture, the Mayan and Pueblo suffered from population collapses due to their farming methods being too exhausting on the soil and lack of any real way to transport bulk food long distances. When a famine hit in one part, it was screwed because you could do nothing to alleviate it even if the rest of the peninsula had bumper harvests. "Native Societies" being inherently better at managing their environments is a total crock of shit, they are no better at doing it than we are.
[QUOTE=Sobotnik;42096197]Indians were actually quite terrible at managing their environments. They managed to help drive all of the Megafauna to extinction (including horses). When they adopted agriculture, the Mayan and Pueblo suffered from population collapses due to their farming methods being too exhausting on the soil and lack of any real way to transport bulk food long distances. When a famine hit in one part, it was screwed because you could do nothing to alleviate it even if the rest of the peninsula had bumper harvests. "Native Societies" being inherently better at managing their environments is a total crock of shit, they are no better at doing it than we are.[/QUOTE] Yeah, I've gotten tired of hearing how the native people were "more in tune with nature". Any society with the resources we have would exploit the shit out of their environment just like we do.
[QUOTE=Bat-shit;42086588]I truly have to say there has been no significant civilization before us, on this planet, I do not think so anyway based on what we've gathered so far. If you look at the amount of [i]stuff[/i] we've created or made as a civilization, you will know that some of that stuff is going to stick around for probably even longer than us. Satellites in the orbit or even today's ancient ruins and shit, and we haven't come across anything like that before.[/QUOTE] completely agree, watch survivor man a few times, he can be walking around in what we think is pristine wilderness yet he usually runs into man-made trash at some point. one episode he washed up on an uninhabited tiny island, found tons of crap that had floated there over the years. if there was an alien civilization here before us, they either had to be very efficient recyclers or they left no trash, either way i don't think that is possible for them to even develope on this planet without leaving some form of garbage around additionally if they truely were advanced enough to leave this planet, or annihilate each other, why are there large concentrated deposits of rare minerals still leftover? uranium comes to mind as being increadibly useful to any significantly advanced civilization as both power and as a weapon, yet there are large untouched deposits that existed to today. Additionally what about oil? just looking at our history, look how much oil we have extracted from this planet in the last 150 years, yet any significant developing pre-human civilization should have exhausted these deposits before we were around. i just think because of these reasons, there is no real way our planet could have been host to multiple intelligent species, as the first would exhaust the easy deposits, the proceeding ones would have to develop on scarcer and scarcer resources and it just doesn't seem possible. [editline]8th September 2013[/editline] [QUOTE=ViralHatred;42092703]Humanity is unique in the fact that unlike everything else on this planet it does not form an equilibrium, and our actions also spoil the balance of nature in many places too. We split from monkeys and then further from that. And then thanks to using our brains and developing weapons and tools we killed off some of the competing hominids eventually driving all but homo sapiens extinct.[/QUOTE] theres not really any evidence besides the small overlap between humans and neanderthals that we killed off our ancestors. most of them died out because conditions changed in the african continent and they couldn't adapt like we did. the way early humans hunted down prey was probably just because we could keep chasing them till they were too exausted to fight, not many species can walk for miles and miles at a time, yet we have an efficeint sweat system and very strong butt-muscle that allows us to. what we see with our divergent cousins is that they either were unable to leave the area around the trees, or were lacking in strong enough bones or muscles to stay mobile like us. some lacked the right teeth and were herbivores, and some evolved different habitats entirely which changed at some point and left them to extinction.
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