Was there intelligent life prior to the dinosaurs?

Question

As in human type life....

plenty of time for it to have happend, but are there any sign's it may be true....

Anything from the air in core ice samples or under the sea?

I fail to believe that for the life of this planet there was nothing before the dinosaurs.

Any thoughts?

Polite ones.

Ok, up to Beautiful Geeks answer, the question is the same but I was a little unsure how to word it.

Is it possible that life intelligent enough to build homes, cities, weapons and enjoy arts, thinking, and leisure excisted at any time on Earth prior to us?

At what, 6 billion years of age, our Earth must have seen a lot, a hell of a lot.

6 Billion years, enough time to rot nuclear fuel, lose any trace of existance.

One answer so far has agreed it is POSSIBLE.

Have we been here before?

We like to think we will be here again if push came to shove.

I believe the soup from which we are made is the remains of our previouse selves.

Well, that's my rant of the day.

Still, the question is, is there any proof of this, and, if not, why?

Could we leave something that will last 6 billion years for our future selves?

If not, would that mean we never excisted?

Sorry about the spelling.

Answer 1

Try reading 'Forbidden Archeology - The Hidden History of the Human Race' by Michael A. Cremo & Richard L. Thompson.
It has a huge amount of evidence pointing towards mankind existing millions of years before what is currently accepted.

One example is a sea shell, carbon dated to 50 million years old and extracted from 50 million year old strata, with a crude face scratched into it.

You'll love it!

Answer 2

If you mean was there life intelligent enough to manipulate the environment and the world to its own means as humanity has done, then no.

Firstly there is no evidence in the fossil record of any life form which was able to create tools to modify their surrounds like primates - and the earliest primates appeared on the planet 60 million years ago - 5 million years AFTER the dinosaurs died out. Undoubtedly, some creatures may have manipulated the environment slightly for shelter or hunting purposes before then, but none had hands or large brains...

But I would say the biggest evidence against intelligent life modifying the environment is the absolute lack of evidence that the Earth's resources have every been exploited - plundered and unsustainably removed (e.g sucking up fossil fuel resources, mining metal deposits, clays, sands...). Metal deposits being exploited today date from 50,000 years (rare) to more than 2700 million years ago and most of the worlds coal resources were laid down around 300-400 million years ago - LONG before the dinosaurs appeared! These deposits do not form overnight - they take a long time to form.

It may only take about 2 million years to erase all evidence that man ever existed on this planet if we all vanished tomorrow, but the concept of geology means if another intelligent life form evolves on Earth, they would work out the most favourable environments for the formation of iron, nickel, oil etc - and would find empty pockets filled in with unconsolidated rubble (or nothing) in their place.

Geologists have NEVER found an area in which the ore has been removed, and cannot be attributed to the action of humans.

So I would argue that an intelligent race cannot develop to the level of humans without leaving some imprint of resource exploitation in the geologic record, and there is no such imprint. No intelligent life before dinosaurs.

Answer 3

Hi,
Much depends on a definition of intelligence.
There were many complicated animals before the dinosaurs. These can be credited with some degree of intelligence, just like us they had senses, had brains, looked for food and evaded predators.
"Social intelligence" certainly existed to a small degree among the dinosaurs themselves and I suspect could possibly have been present in other animals prior to the dinosaurs.
If you mean human-style technological intelligence then there is no evidence of this before human civilisation. And a species that, for example, made tools or built permanant dwellings, you would expect to have left its mark.
Ice cores reveal a record from modern times to Roman iron smelting and right back to climate and atmospheric changes in Earth's early history. As far as I know there's nothing that requires a pre-human civilisation as an explanation.
Rest assured if any evidence that even hinted at pre-dinosaur technology were ever found, it would be headline news all around the world overnight.
Regards, JC.

Answer 4

Good question. Science works by asking questions such as these and then trying to find evidence to support them. of course if no evidence can be found, then the hypothesis should be rejected.

Fossil evidence shows that life emerged very early in the history of the Earth, but it had a very simple nature, such as bacteria and algae. complicated forms with internal structure and hard preservable bodies did not emerge until the Cambrian period about 500 million years ago.

You obviously know about the mass extinction event that killed the dinosaurs, but what you might not know is that there have been many similar extinction events prior to the dinosaurs emerging. One such extinction event, most probably caused by a meteorite impact occurred at the end of the Permian period about 250 million years ago. This extinction was so severe that up to 99.5% of all known species were wiped out! We know this by looking at fossils buried in the rocks, and the ages of the rocks at which these species disappear.

There is no evidence in the fossil record that any previous life form had a similar level of intelligence or civilisation as humans prior to the dinosaurs. The fossil record is incomplete, but it is a good approximation to the sort of life that was around. While complex life has been around on the Earth for around 500 million years, the evolutionary process has often had to 'start again' due to mass extinction events.

could the same thing happen to us? Absolutely.

Good question, if you want to know more, there are many good books about palaeontology which describe the types of animals that have inhabited the Earth throughout its history.

Answer 5

You're a little ambiguous. First, you ask about intelligent life prior to the dinosaurs, which seems to imply that dinosaurs were intelligent. This begs the question of what would you count as intelligence? If having enough smarts to get by from one day to the next, finding food, finding mates, avoiding predators, and so on. I suppose intelligent life began with some of the creatures that inhabited the seas well before the dinosaurs.

On the other hand, if intelligence implies philosophizing, analyzing the world with abstract thought, inventing tools and agriculture to supplement hunting and gathering, then that kind of intelligence seems to have begun—or at least blossomed—with hominids. Some of those things preceded man (for example, ants herd aphids and "milk" them of honeydew), but those behaviors seem to have evolved rather than been invented those creatures.

Of course, if intelligent life is as common as some astronomers and cosmologists speculate, then intelligent life may have occurred elsewhere long before it occurred here.

Answer 6

look up the anunnaki, it's interesting stuff really, aliens who tampered with primitive man then helped them to grow. the sumerian gods X

hi there i came back, the earliest PROOF of intelligent life (i believe) is the sumerians dating back approx. 6000 years ago.

In the 6th century B.C. the scribes of Enuma Anu Enlil were a group of men at the Babylonian court who were experts in astronomy and astrology.

Texts refer to this group of scribes, but we do not know exactly who they were, what they did and how they were trained. However, for hundreds of years the scribes kept accurate records of natural events on the earth and in the sky in order to predict the future.

also you could argue that the dinosaurs didn't really live 65 million years ago which is apparently FACT.

Palaeontologists have extracted soft, flexible structures that appear to be blood vessels from the bone of a Tyrannosaurus rex that died 68 million years ago. They also have found small red micro-structures that resemble red blood cells. How did they survive so long without deteriorating?

There are also all the mythical dragons, st george so forth. which make me think that perhaps dinosaurs an people lived together in the beginning....

don't take my word for it though, it's all speculation really, there isn't that much proof but just look around see what you find X

Answer 7

> Was the development of intelligent life an inevitable consequence of natural selection? Nope. That's why it took hundreds of millions of years for it to happen. The dinosaurs, for example, lived and thrived just fine without the kind of conscious intelligence we have.

Answer 8

I don't think human life, but certainly the dinosaurs had to evolve from something, scientists believe we came from a "genetic soup" of cells that was on the earth and different species were created by cells adapting differently to the conditions around them.

Answer 9

There's no evidence for intelligent life prior to the dinosaurs. There's also not much evidence of intelligent life since the dinosaurs if some of these answers are anything to go by!

Answer 10

Well, there was life before the dinosaurs, but during that time all creatures were concerned with survival, with no time to develop higher learning and civilization. Only until recently with humans and our supreme intellect were we able to not only survive, but have time left over to develop art and civilization. There is no evidence to suggest that could have happened earlier (though it still might be possible).