"If dinosaurs had a civilization, how primitive must it..." Topic

… have been to leave no trace in the present?

"I am thinking of, yes, a simple story with intelligent dinosaurs, but I am not interested (And I sincerely prefer) that they are not sufficiently advanced in my history to be comparable to modern humans, at most I imagine them similar to the humans of the Neolithic. BUT, if it is in any way possible that they could be more advanced without leaving a trace in the world I would like to know. If, on the contrary, they need to be even more primitive than Neolithic humans in order to not leave traces of their existence, I will understand, I just want to know.

What I want is to make it almost impossible to prove that they existed, at least for now.

Some details are; In my story there are not several species of intelligent dinos, only some variations of troodons. I imagine them only having 4 or 5 towns or cities in an area of ​​only 40 km. They haven't "spread" around the world or anything. They are basically the first "cities" in the world. I imagine them having primitive wood and stone weapons, art made of wood, amber, and maybe stone, and a couple of religions. I imagine them having a social leader (a king?) And a religious leader, only these would wear clothes and it would only be partial. Maybe the warriors or something could wear ornaments made with their own feathers or those of other species of dinosaurs."
From here

link

Amicalement
Armand

Which leads inevitably to the question :

Armand, how on earth do you find this stuff?

Clearly you've never had to look up a poorly recalled book at some point Squash; This is one of the branches of the Stack Exchange, a place where sometimes the vuagest of plot descriptions will get you the exact book you read soem decades ago, among, as you can see, the answer to many other queries. It's one of the better features of the Internet "Hive Mind" social experience.

And to answer the question, given the long periods of time involved, it would be possible for an intelligent saruian species to reach at least late 18th century technology and collpase to be undetectable to modern science; Unless we dug up one of their skeletons ( Quite rare even for a populopus species ), and even then we might not recognise them as intelligent from physical structure alone, and as for artifcats . . . . Very little of *our* civilization would survive that long a time in a recgnizable state. Even plastics would have decayed to base chemicals by then.

I always liked the Silurians & the Sea Devils in Dr Who; they were advanced, but left no discernable trace of their civilization for today. Time erodes everything…

1. Robert Ardrey makes a relevant point in one of his books. Our civilization was built on use of easily obtainable materials. Once we found out how useful iron or oil (for example) were, we have used up the easily obtainable deposits, and are going for the more difficult ones. If our civilization collapsed, a new civilization based on iron or oil would not be possible. The smart dinosaurs may have pillaged and plundered the easily accessible supplies of something we consider rare.
2. Covert Walrus makes a good point about "recognizable state." Especially since the artifact may not have been particularly recognizable to us to begin with. I know what a claw hammer looks like, but would the tool a troodon developed to perform the same function necessarily look like that?
3. We assume they process data the way we do. Our primary input is visual. Dogs, no matter how smart they were, would never develop the motion picture because their primary source of input is scent. They'd be much happier eating buttered popcorn while a story played out in a series of smells.

Grelber

1. Robert Ardrey makes a relevant point in one of his books. Our civilization was built on use of easily obtainable materials. Once we found out how useful iron or oil (for example) were, we have used up the easily obtainable deposits, and are going for the more difficult ones. If our civilization collapsed, a new civilization based on iron or oil would not be possible. The smart dinosaurs may have pillaged and plundered the easily accessible supplies of something we consider rare.
2. Covert Walrus makes a good point about "recognizable state." Especially since the artifact may not have been particularly recognizable to us to begin with. I know what a claw hammer looks like, but would the tool a troodon developed to perform the same function necessarily look like that?
3. We assume they process data the way we do. Our primary input is visual. Dogs, no matter how smart they were, would never develop the motion picture because their primary source of input is scent. They'd be much happier eating buttered popcorn while a story played out in a series of smells.

Grelber

It's entirely possible that dinosaurs had a technologically advanced civilization far beyond our own, but that after some 65 million years, we just can't recognize anything we find as an artifact.

When we explore the Moon more thoroughly, however, we may start finding things they left behind, because they won't have been worn down by erosion and oxidation. On the other hand, we probably won't be able to carbon-date anything, so determining the age of artifacts will be a challenge.

Thanks!.

Amicalement
Armand

Carbon dating is only possible up to around 50,000 years ago, beyond that other radioisotopes would be used. For dating fossils from 65+ million years, the most common used is Uranium 235.
So, we might be able to detect dinosaur civilization, if they used nuclear power :)

In my youth, I enjoyed the :
'Saga of the Exiles Series 3 Books Collection Set By Julian May (The Many-Coloured Land, The Golden Torc, The Adversary)'
A collection of near future misfits sent back to an 'untouched' Pliocene for various reasons…only to find that an Alien race has got there first. The story providing very faint 'echoes' in Irish Mythology.
Haven't read in a very long time, though. so probably not as good as it was to a teen back then! lol.

Fossils really only really form at water land interfaces. Sea shore, lakes, river banks. So, if your Sapien-Sauropods lived in dry land, and did not used fire to make brick (Human 7000 BCE), or metal (Human 4000 BCE), or Glass (Human 3500 BCE), your intelligent Dinos could have had a near modern civilization without leave much of a trace. If they like fiber-based and other compostable goods they might not of even dropped stone tools along the way. Or if they size was large (as often happen with dinos) their stone tools might not be recognized as such. What does an adze for something with a four foot palm look like? The changes in the shadows of dirt that people can use to interpret wooded human structures might have been well washed down hill by now.

You ever watch Disney's "Dinosaurs!"?.

@Heedless Horseman:

I read at least the first one of those, too. Thanks for reminding me.