Open Veils · Answer
What evidence exists of pre human advanced civilisations?
The physical record of a civilisation older than the Quaternary would be statistically unlikely to survive erosion, subduction and geological recycling — making absence of evidence structurally different from evidence of absence. Robert Schoch's redating of the Sphinx enclosure to pre-12,000 BCE, corroborated by seismic analysis, places monument-building capacity before every accepted founding civilisation. Graham Hancock's synthesis across Göbekli Tepe, Gunung Padang, and underwater continental-shelf sites argues for a coherent but largely submerged predecessor culture. The Silurian Hypothesis, proposed by Adam Frank and Gavin Schmidt, formalises the preservation problem: after tens of millions of years, only isotopic and sedimentary anomalies — not artefacts — would survive.
Evidence
- Robert Schoch, geologist at Boston University, presented petrographic and seismic evidence that the Sphinx enclosure shows deep precipitation-induced weathering inconsistent with post-3,000 BCE construction, pushing its origins into the Younger Dryas or earlier.
- At Göbekli Tepe, Klaus Schmidt's excavations revealed enclosures deliberately backfilled around 8,000 BCE — a preservation act that Michael Cremo and Andrew Collins interpret as evidence of institutional memory protecting a site from an older tradition.
- John Anthony West championed the same thesis, noting that Egyptologists were forced to dispute geology with archaeology — a methodologically asymmetric argument.
- Randall Carlson independently converges on the same Younger Dryas impact window (circa 10,800–9,600 BCE) using geological catastrophism data, corroborating Hancock's timeline through an entirely different discipline.
- Collins further identifies the site's astronomical alignment with Cygnus rather than the more commonly cited Orion, implying a star-knowledge lineage preceding Sumer by millennia.