The Vanished Civilizations
Civilization, folks, is a proud rooster strutting on a fence rail, crowing as if the sun itself depends on him. We moderns like to think we invented the dawn — writing, cities, science, skyscrapers — as if no humans before us ever thought to do more than scratch on stones and chase dinner through the brush. Yet if history teaches anything, it’s that pride makes poor arithmetic. When you count only what survived the flood, the fire, and the gnawing teeth of time, you’re left with a mighty lopsided sum.
The Mystery Beneath the Silence
Anatomically modern humans have walked this earth for over 300,000 years, but what we call “history” accounts for less than 2% of that span. The other 98% lies in silence, which archaeologists politely label “prehistory.” The orthodox view is simple: our ancestors muddled along for hundreds of millennia with stone tools and campfires until, almost overnight, civilization bloomed in Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, and the Americas — as if humanity suddenly woke from a long nap.
But what if those weren’t beginnings, only restarts?
The earth, after all, is a poor archivist. Metals corrode in centuries, concrete crumbles in millennia, glass fractures back into sand. Even plastics disintegrate into invisible specks. Forests reclaim cities; seas swallow coastlines; ice sheets bulldoze the land clean. After 100,000 years, our own skyscrapers would vanish almost as surely as a hut of reeds. Silence, in this context, is not proof of nothing. It’s what you’d expect.
Ghosts That Do Survive
Still, there are whispers. At Kalambo Falls, nearly half a million years ago, humans built wooden structures with planning and engineering. At Blombos Cave, 100,000 years ago, ochre was etched with abstract symbols and paints were compounded from multiple ingredients. These aren’t the behaviors of “simple” people. They are fingerprints of intelligence — cultural sparks peeking through the ash of time.
Yet we’ve found only nine archaeological sites older than 100,000 years. Nine, to cover two hundred millennia of human life. That is not a census; it is a coin toss. And what survives is skewed toward stone because stone alone survives. If a culture thrived in wood, reeds, fibers, or even more ephemeral technologies — resins, bioluminescence, waterways instead of roads — we would almost certainly miss it.
A Different Civilization Entirely
Our greatest bias is imagining the past in our own likeness. We expect skyscrapers, bronze blades, and carved tablets because that’s what we build. But what if their monuments were songs, rituals, and seasonal cities designed to dissolve back into the landscape? What if their genius was not in steel but in stewardship, weaving technologies of earth and sky, built to leave no scar?
Such a civilization could have been as sophisticated as ours, yet invisible to us — erased by time, ignored by our own blind search for reflections of ourselves.
What Will They Find of Us?
And here’s the twist of irony: fast-forward 100,000 years, and future archaeologists may be asking the same question about us.
What will survive of our glass towers, asphalt highways, and glittering machines? The answer is: very little. Steel rusts. Concrete crumbles. Plastics break into dust. Even our digital records — billions of photos, videos, and texts — will vanish with the servers that house them. Perhaps a few carved stones will endure: Mount Rushmore, the Pyramids, the heads of Easter Island. Perhaps traces of plutonium in the soil will whisper that we once split the atom. Maybe a few golden records adrift in space will still hum songs from a planet long gone.
But it’s equally possible that when they sift the earth, they’ll find almost nothing. Our skyscrapers may leave less trace than a campfire in the sand. Our proud age of silicon and steel could dissolve into silence, just as countless ages before us may have done.
And if an asteroid like the one that killed the dinosaurs were to strike tomorrow, I doubt there would be any smartphones, satellites, skyscrapers, or even dams left behind. It would all be erased — the universe drawing across our works with its giant eraser, just as the Hindus once believed, in endless cycles of creation and destruction
Now, I’m not telling you there was a great forgotten civilization a hundred thousand years ago. I’m just saying the odds are mighty slim that a world so old and so busy left us the whole truth neatly bound in stone and bone. The earth is a gambler that always rakes the table, and time is her favorite trick.
So here we sit, congratulating ourselves for being the first, when for all we know, we’re only the latest rooster on the fence rail — crowing at a sun that has risen countless times before, and may rise countless times again, long after our own footprints have blown away like dust.
EXTRA CREDIT
So you laugh at my Rooster in the main picture.
Well, in a very real sense, roosters (and all modern birds) are the living descendants of Tyrannosaurus rex and other theropod dinosaurs.
Here’s how it works:
The Dinosaur–Bird Connection
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Theropod lineage: T. rex belonged to the theropod group of dinosaurs, the same branch that gave rise to modern birds.
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Shared traits: Birds and theropods share hollow bones, three-toed limbs, wishbone-like structures, and even evidence of feathers in many species.
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Genetic links: In 2007, researchers extracted proteins from a fossilized T. rex bone and found strong similarities with modern chickens and ostriches.
Where Roosters Fit In
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The domestic chicken (Gallus gallus domesticus) is part of this evolutionary chain.
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Roosters are simply the male chickens — and yes, they carry the genetic heritage that stretches back through theropods to giants like T. rex.
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You could say, in a poetic but scientifically grounded way, that a rooster crowing at dawn is the distant echo of a dinosaur’s roar.
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