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Wait, wait, I thought mud was great for preserving fossils? Eg that Albertan Nodosaur fossil that turned up recently. And if they're working stone, the evidence
by flir 2y ago
Wait, wait, I thought mud was great for preserving fossils? Eg that Albertan Nodosaur fossil that turned up recently. And if they're working stone, the evidence won't even need a preservation step, because it was never organic - just a mudslide or a storm.
- Jerrrrrrry 2y ago0.00000001% of animals are fossilized. 99.9999% of animals are extinct. We had almost nothing, but a lot of it was inferrable.
- flir 2y agoI feel like everyone's jumping over the worked stone. We're assuming a technological civilization here, but without accidental geoengineering or even surviving artifacts. Flaked flint and pottery get everywhere. It just doesn't seem likely to me. The arguments seem very "God of the gaps" in nature.
- Jerrrrrrry 2y ago>The arguments seem very "God of the gaps" in nature. It is an argument from ignorance, but the timescales of pottery (1-20k ya) dwarf the porcelain thrones and nitrous oxide disposables that will be the only remaining artifact of our existence in 10 million years. Which is still a brief moment in time, compared to the timescales of the epoch proceeding.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> thought mud was great for preserving fossils? If rapidly and anoxically deposited. Undersea landslides and volcanoes do that. Dredging operations may, too.
- flir 2y agoI really chewed up my original comment. "a mudslide or a storm" was supposed to bind to the bit about organic fossils, not the bit about inorganic artifacts. I think "rapid" might be a relative term (I'm thinking of the Mary Rose and the Vasa). When you get to the more durable artifacts that come with a technological civilization we really should be thinking in decades, maybe centuries.