Category: Ancient Civilizations

Miscellaneous facts about ancient civilizations that interest me, from ancient aliens to the possibility of a now-extinct non-human technological society.

EP. 12: H.P. LOVECRAFT’S VISION OF AN EVIL PRE-HUMAN CIVILIZATION

On By AlessandraIn Ancient Civilizations, Books, Reading, Silurian Hypothesis

In a recent post, I discussed the Silurian Hypothesis, which is the possibility that our human civilization is not the first one on Earth. Sci-fi authors have explored this concept in their works for at least a century.

One of the first was Howard Phillips Lovecraft, the author of the Cthulhu Mythos. As early as 1917, he wrote the story Dagon, where the protagonist escapes the German U-boat that sank his merchant ship. However, the sailor soon finds himself on a strange island that “[…] by some unprecedented volcanic upheaval […] must have been thrown to the surface, exposing regions that for innumerable years had lain hidden […]”.

In the middle of the island is a disturbing artifact, an ancient monolith engraved with occult symbols and figures. This human-amphibian mixture fills the protagonist with an inexplicable terror, which only grows worse when a slithering, sucking monstrosity crawls up from the sea and over the monolith. The sight plunges the unlucky man into madness. As a result, he runs away on a “delirious journey” until he wakes up in a San Francisco hospital, where no one believes him, and he’s left alone with the knowledge of the Thing’s existence and what it implies. A Thing so ancient that its existence dwarfs any human concept of time.

Although Dagon is an excellent introduction to Lovecraft’s obsession with vast, inhuman worlds beyond the limit of our knowledge, some of his later works dive even deeper into the rabbit hole of an unbearably old and malign civilization that predates and will outlast humans and their limited, relatively trivial experiences.

In February 1931, he wrote the sci-fi-horror novella At the Mountains of Madness, later serialized in the early 1936 issues of Astounding Stories.

The story is about an American expedition to Antarctica by geologist William Dyer from the fictional Miskatonic University of Arkham. Lovecraft had long been fascinated with Antarctica, though in the 1930s, the continent was not fully explored. As a result, Lovecraft could set his story in a mountainous chain “higher than the Himalayas” (the so-called Mountains of Madness) without fear of contradiction.

The expedition begins promisingly but ends in tragedy and horror after a sub-expedition led by a colleague of Dyer, the biologist Lake, discovers the frozen remains of monstrous barrel-shaped creatures that cannot be reconciled with the known evolution of this planet. They seem half-animal and half-vegetable, with greater brain capacity and super-human sensitivity. Lake jokingly identifies the strange beings with the Elder Things or Old Ones of the Necronomicon, who are “supposed to have created all Earth life as jest or mistake.”

Fig.1: An Antarctic setting in the style of Nicholas Roerich, H.P. Lovecraft’s favorite painter. Image made by the author with Midjourney AI.

Soon, Lake’s sub-expedition loses radio contact with the main party, apparently because of bad weather. However, when Dyer takes a small group of men in some airplanes to find out whatever happened to Lake and company, they discover a devasted camp and no trace of the specimens of the Old Ones, but for a few damaged ones, which they presume must have been buried by Gedney, the one human they couldn’t identify among the corpses.

Fig.2: Lovecraft had a lifelong interest in Antarctic exploration. Image made by the author with Midjourtney AI.

Dyer and a graduate student, Danforth, investigate the mysterious tragedy further by scaling the immense plateau that makes “Everest out of the running.” To their amazement, they find an enormous stone city, fifty to one hundred miles in extent, likely dating to millions of years before any humans evolved on the planet. The subsequent exploration of some interiors leads Dyer and Danforth to conclude that the Old Ones built the city.

Fig.3: A shoggoth in the city of the Old Ones. Image made by the author with Microsoft Bing AI.

Also, by studying some drawings and carvings on the city walls, the two adventurers discover that the Elder Things came from outer space millions of years ago, establishing themselves in Antarctica and eventually spreading across the entire Earth. This is where the shoggoths – shapeless, fifteen-foot masses of gel-like substance which they controlled using hypnotic suggestion – first become important. Over time, these living robots developed a somewhat conscious brain and will, which led to the Old Ones having to deal with the shoggoths’ frequent rebellion attempts. The Old Ones faced more difficulties when other extraterrestrial races, such as the fungus-like creatures from Yuggoth and the Cthulhu spawn, arrived on Earth. The ensuing territorial wars pushed them back to their original settlement in Antarctica. Ultimately, their extinction became inevitable when they lost the ability to travel through space.

Shortly after, Dyer and Danforth discover the body of Gedney and a dog. They also stumble upon a group of Old Ones without their heads, suggesting they regained consciousness after thawing in Lake’s camp. Dyer observes that Gedney’s body was carefully protected to avoid further harm. From this, it can be inferred that the Old Ones were responsible for the destruction of Lake’s camp and took Gedney as a sample. However, the question remains: who killed the Old Ones?

At that point, Dyer and Danforth hear a disturbing piping sound. Afraid it could be some other Old Ones, they flee in terror, but not before they turn their flashlights upon a fast-approaching thing and find that it is “… a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train – a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and unforming as pustules of greenish light over the tunnel-filling front…”

But the two explorer’s trial is not yet over. As they return to camp, Danforth shrieks in horror: “Teke-li! Teke-li!” He has seen something even worse than the shoggoth who killed the Old Ones, something that unhinges his mind, although he refuses to tell Danforth what it is.

Although initially portrayed as scary creatures, the Old Ones are the main focus of the story “At the Mountains of Madness.” Eventually, they are overpowered by the shoggoths, who are described as “the things that even the scary things fear.” Near the end, the Old Ones stop being scary. This is a common theme in stories about civilizations that existed before our current one. For example, similar themes can be found in the novels A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr (1959) and The Second Sleep by Robert Harris (2019). The Old Ones have a deep connection with humans, representing a perfect society that Lovecraft hopes humanity will someday achieve. However, they are much more advanced than humans in various ways, such as intelligence, perception, and artistic ability. As mentioned earlier, the Old Ones are responsible for creating all life on Earth, including humans. Nevertheless, they are destroyed by the shoggoths, initially created by the Old Ones as slaves. This illustrates Lovecraft’s belief in the inevitable rise and fall of civilizations.

Finally, At the Mountains of Madness introduces what later became a trope of sci-fi and fringe literature: most mythological “gods” were mere extraterrestrial beings, and their followers were mistaken about their true nature. The critical passage occurs in the middle of the novella when Dyer acknowledges that the Old Ones must have built the gigantic city in which he has been wandering:

They were the makers and the enslavers of Earth life, and above all doubt the originals of the fiendish elder myths which things like the Pnakotic Manuscripts and the Necronomicon affrightedly hint about.

EP. 11: THE SILURIAN HYPOTHESIS AND ITS SCARY IMPLICATIONS

On By AlessandraIn Ancient Civilizations, Silurian Hypothesis

The Silurians are fictional creatures that appeared in an episode of the cult science fiction TV show Dr. Who. In the story, these lizard-like creatures achieved industrial expertise about 450 million years ago, long before humans evolved on Earth.

In recent years, the idea of advanced prehistoric life has turned out to be intriguing far beyond its entertainment value, raising various exciting questions. Not least is this: if an industrial civilization had existed in the past, what traces would it have left? In other words, how do we know that ours is the first technological civilization on Earth?

Modern humans have been around for 200,000 years, but life has existed on this planet for 3.5 billion. That leaves more than enough time for the rise and fall of not one but several pre-human industrial civilizations. Yet, so far, little serious thought has been given to the possibility that we are not the first species to build a civilization in the Solar System’s history.

We’re used to imagining extinct civilizations in terms of underwater statues and subterranean ruins. These artifacts of previous societies are acceptable if we are only interested in timescales of a few thousand years. But things get trickier once we are interested in “deep time,” meaning tens or hundreds of millions of years ago. It is unlikely that any massive artificial structures would remain preserved through eons of geological activity.

Urban areas presently comprise less than 1% of the Earth’s surface. So any comparable settlements from an earlier civilization would be easy for modern-day paleontologists to miss. And no one should count on finding a Jurassic-era artifact, e.g., the Antikythera mechanism, used by the ancient Greeks and considered the world’s first computer. Complex items don’t last millions of years. The same is true for fossils of beings who might have lived in industrial civilizations. Moreover, the fraction of life that gets fossilized is tiny; of all the many dinosaurs that ever lived, only a few thousand fossil specimens have been discovered. Given that the oldest known fossils of Homo Sapiens are only about 300,000 years old, there is no certainty that our species might even appear in the fossil record in the long run.

For these reasons, Adam Frank, a physicist at the University of Rochester, and Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, have recently focused on what kind of signature a technological species might leave behind.

Fig.1: Intelligent dinosaurs in an ancient technological civilization. Picture made by the author with Midjourney AI.

The best way to answer this question is to figure out what evidence we would leave behind if our civilization collapsed at the current stage of development.

Humanity’s collective activity is laying down a variety of traces that will be detectable by scientists 100 million years in the future. The extensive use of fertilizers, for example, means we’re redirecting the planet’s nitrogen flow into food production. Future researchers should see this in characteristics of nitrogen showing up in sediments from their era. And then there’s all the plastic.

Increasing amounts of plastic are deposited on the seafloor everywhere, even in the Arctic. Sooner or later, all this plastic turns into microscopic particles, creating a layer that could persist for geological timescales. Still, the most promising marker of humanity’s presence is the carbon released into the atmosphere as a by-product of the burning of fossil fuels. This ancient carbon derives from plant life, which preferentially absorbs more of the lighter isotope carbon-12 than the heavier isotope carbon-13. The more fossil fuels we burn, the more the balance of these carbon isotopes shifts. Temperature increases also leave isotopic signals.

So if these are traces our civilization is bound to leave for the future, might the same “signals” waiting to be uncovered right now in ancient geological strata? Fifty-five million years ago, global temperatures rose from 9 to 14 degrees Fahrenheit. This is called the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM). During the PETM, Earth’s surface temperature rose because of a sudden release of greenhouse gases from the Earth’s crust. These greenhouse gases caused the climate to warm and the ocean to become more acidic. Such environmental conditions may have led to the extinction of most of the dinosaurs.
There are also other similar events in Earth’s history. For example, an event that occurred only a few million years after the PETM is called the Eocene Layers of Mysterious Origin. More massive events in the Cretaceous left the ocean without oxygen for millennia.

These events are almost certainly not caused by previous non-human civilizations. The present era (known as Anthropocene) is remarkable because of the speed at which we dump fossil carbon into the atmosphere. There have been geological periods where Earth’s CO2 has been as high or higher than it is today, but never before in the planet’s long history has so much buried carbon been dumped back into the atmosphere so quickly. Still, the PETM carbon isotope spike mostly shows Earth’s timescales for responding to whatever caused it, not necessarily the timescale of the cause. Finding evidence of a short-lived event in ancient sediments might take reliable and novel detection methods.

Fig.2: Two hypothetical members of a long-gone industrial civilization. Picture made by the author with Midjourney AI.