Ancient Civilizations – The Silurian Hypothesis

It’s called the Silurian Hypothesis. Basically, it states that human beings might not be the first intelligent life forms to have evolved on this planet and that if there really were precursors some 100 million years ago, virtually all signs of them would have been lost by now.

It might seem obvious that we’d see the signs of such a civilization — after all, there were dinosaurs 100 million years ago, and we know that because we’ve found their fossils. But they were around for more than 150 million years. That’s important because it’s not just about how old the ruins of this hypothetical civilization would be, nor how widespread it was. It’s also about how long it was around. Humanity has spread across the globe in a remarkably short amount of time — over the course of about 100,000 years. If another species did the same, then our chances of spotting it in the geological record would be a whole lot smaller.

For decades the archaeological community labored under the theory that human civilization began after the last Ice Age. The theory conjectured that, prior to that time, humans were no more than primitive hunter-gatherers incapable of communal organization or sophisticated abilities, and it was only after the last glacial period—following the melting of the 10,000 foot thick ice sheets that covered much of the northern portion of the world’s continents—that our human ancestors began to develop agriculture and complex economic and social structures, sometime around 4000 B.C.

Archaeologists therefore theorized that the first cities did not develop until about 3500 B.C. in Mesopotamia and Egypt. Contemporary discoveries have dramatically transformed those theories. Modern research has unearthed buried civilizations and discovered submerged cities one after another—archaeology and anthropology now reconstruct an unsuspected antiquity of man—fresh discoveries prove all history false and paint a canvas of stunningly mysterious dimensions.

What if ancient civilizations existed. What would it mean? Let’s discuss it.