Civilization has been pushed back too with stuff like Gobekli Tepe. If I had to make a bet I'd say there's probably a lot of far older stuff out there, some of which might not be discovered due to destruction during the end of the last ice age or simply having been built in temperate climates instead of desert or near-desert. Agriculture and permanent settlement and systems of governance were probably discovered multiple times in multiple places.
It's a trend in space too with better and better telescopes. The further we look, the more we see.
great comment, The further we look, the more we see.
we know nothing really and the same applies when we look at the smallest particle, the further we look the more we see how subatomic particles keep coming up.
which makes me think.....the systems been designed in a way it was never really for us to be able to understand no matter what we do
If you google for "francevillian biota" or "stirling biota" you'll find some freely-available PDFs describing what might be multi-cellular life's fossils in africa and australia.
I'm kind of hoping that paleontologists decide there was multi-cellular life on earth which got wiped out by the Snowball Earth Marinoan and Sturtian global glaciations.
Everytime I hear the words "earlier than previously thought" makes me think the whole "thought process" is wrong. Which makes me think we know very little actually but its often advertised and taught as fact.
That's sort of a surface view. The primary source papers in paleontology are extremely cautious about saying "this is the start". They tend to say things like "earliest found so far". Popularizing the papers, which really aren't that hard to understand, seems to make hedged or relative conclusions into absolutes. And if a teacher imparts absolutes, then they're not doing a good job.
Civilization has been pushed back too with stuff like Gobekli Tepe. If I had to make a bet I'd say there's probably a lot of far older stuff out there, some of which might not be discovered due to destruction during the end of the last ice age or simply having been built in temperate climates instead of desert or near-desert. Agriculture and permanent settlement and systems of governance were probably discovered multiple times in multiple places.
It's a trend in space too with better and better telescopes. The further we look, the more we see.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Deep_Field
https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/nasas-webb-delivers-deepe...
Webb sees galaxies earlier than they should be, and more of them than it should see.
The universe is huge in both time and space, much larger than we would have imagined even 50-100 years ago.
It's biiiiiiiiig maaaaaaan... bubble bubble...