Originally posted by linliangtai
reply to post by TheDebunkMachine
Modern people may not recognize the mass extinction events I mentioned, which I elaborate a bit below:
Mass extinction event: In a few hours' time, two thirds of all living human beings on Earth died. Many of the remaining human beings died shortly
after the event too. But humans never went extinct. Before the event, humans had developed very advanced civilization. After the event, the remaining
humans had to return to low-tech lives and primitive lives. It took very, very long time for humans to develop again low-tech civilization from the
primitive societies.
Okay... I work in a paleontology lab, and I work with a lot of dinosaur material.
This scenario never happened.
How do we know?
* there are lots of fossils (most of them are fairly humble marine fossils, and they number in the bazillions) that show life didn't suddenly
collapse. The extinction events take hundreds or thousands of years to complete.
* civilizations have a huge impact on the planet. Creatures don't wake up one day and say "hey, I'm tired of living in trees. I'm going to
invent the I-phone today and advanced space travel because I'm bored." In order to get to any device (and maintain it) you need a large population,
resource use (mines, trees, farms, ways of getting products around, ways of moving people and things, etc, etc) which all change the structure of the
earth -- including how the soil is crushed. And before you get there, your creatures have to learn how to mine, smelt, use fuels, develop advanced
chemistry (yes, even if aliens come in and zap their brains and hand them Ipaqs) and power technology.
* Civilizations leave artifacts.
Dinosaurs and humans went through quite a few such mass extinction events. It is not easy to tell exactly when such events took place if people
do not really know our distant past.
The archosaurs aren't dinosaurs, and only a few groups survived the Permian extinction. The only dinosaurs to survive the Cretaceous (note: they
didn't all drop dead within weeks or days) was the velociraptor lineage that had modified to become the first birds (30 million years before the end
of the Cretaceous.)
And the "fossils" in the original article ... aren't fossils. They've been examined by others. I've seen numerous photos of the "skullcap,"
which is far too thick to be a real human skull (while going to college, I was a Teaching Assistant for the human anatomy labs, so I've seen a lot of
human skulls and know how thick they can be.)
The owner of the "skull" also has (as I recall) "fossilized kidney" and other such artifacts. They're limestone rocks that he thinks look like
human organs. Any biology student who's taken human anatomy will tell you that the real organs look nothing like these rocks (even if you squashed
and compressed them they still don't look like those "fossil" organs.)