QUOTE(Mr Walker @ Aug 9 2006, 10:39 PM) [snapback]1301868[/snapback]
The way evolution occurred, it took all that time to produce one intelligent/thinking species and get to our present level of technology. Apart from the lack of any evidence for any early civilization, there wasn't time for it to evolve.
That's not really true, though. The genus Homo has only been around for about 5-7 million years. And
Homo sapiens has only been around for about 250,000 years. Considering that life on earth is about 3.5 billion years old, there's certainly more than enough time for another species to have evolved to sentience and then been wiped out. Time is not really an issue.
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For example we know there were no human like creatures around during the age of the dinosaurs for obvious reasons. This leaves us with "alien" civilizations, which are possible, but why would they bother, given that they would be dealing with, at best, apes at a lower level than Australopithecene. While i would like to believe, history suggests that Atlantis was one of the first urban legends.
Now, I'm not saying humans were around at the time of the dinosaurs. Please don't think I'm saying that (and anyone who believes in that really should do me a favor and NOT use anything I say as positive for their argument). It might seem as if we have oodles and oodles of fossils, but really what we have is so incredibly tiny compared to what life on earth was at the time, it is entirely possible that there were sentient species living on earth at that time. We just might not have found anything yet. Geologic forces are awesome and extreme and can completely obliterate everything that might have been there before.
There could possibly have been a species that evolved from previous species on the planet that was living here and we just haven't found any traces yet. Like I said, we're only limited to what we've found, and as any archaeologist knows, sometimes a depression in the ground indicates a settlement. And if that was only in 10,000 years, imagine what can get destroyed in millions of years!
Of course, this is kind of ridiculous to place Atlanteans before human history, because who would be around to tell the story of Atlantis?
I wouldn't rule out aliens entirely, but I think it's most likely that Atlantis is merely a conglomeration of stories of different destroyed civilizations/cities (Thera for one) that turned into a legend.
Though I still say floating city built by ascended masters in the Pegasus galaxy.