Walking with questions

I recently watched the documentary series "Walking with Dinosaurs", "Walking with Beasts", "Walking with Monsters" and "Walking with Cavemen", in which, as is obvious from the title(s), prehistoric creatures/early hominids are made to prance about their environments, in scenarios created by palaeontologists/anthropologists, concerning social behaviour and all that other biological baggage that comes when dealing with extinct beings. My personal favourite in the series is the "Walking with Beasts" one- it's got an epic intro!

So of course ( I dunno whether this is a good habit or bad), it set me off thinking- What if- hypothetically speaking, we all die out in the next million years and some millions of generations later, some other intelligent form of life digs our bones up? What sort of questions would they ask? Would they unravel all the unpleasantness in the world right now/ before now? Will they be able to look at our petrified bodies, now entombed in stone and find out why there are mass graves in some areas of the world? Can they find any evidence of our complex social interactions- one that uniquely defines us as human?

I thought, you know, "Let's have a look at we humans/palaeontologists/anthropologists do". So consider this example- a dinosaur has been excavated (now we are pseudo palaeontologists) and it is a relatively common dinosaur- say, an "Allosaurus" or an "Iguanodon". After all the usual examination of the fossilized skeleton and taking cross sections of these bones to see internal bone structure and all that, palaeontologists look to scan and make a 3-D image or even find a fossilized bit of the brain (Usually they find fossilized dung more easily than they find fossilized brain). Using the brain model, they compare it to several other extant species, whose brains are similar and then try to deduce behaviour. So, "Allosaurus" has a brain similar to that of a crocodile and was built similar to a bird (look at a pigeon, if you don't believe me- or better, go to the Jurong Bird Park and see a few ostriches). Therefore, looking at what diseases the skeleton shows and how the bones have healed after a fracture and many more bits and bobs, they can build up a picture of its life.

So, let us have a look at what those creatures, a million years from now, having found our bodies would do, if humans die out. Now I dunno if they would be able to find many of our inventions- unless a river overflows and covers a town in mud and silt, they would have a poor understanding of our system of government and all that... But let’s suppose that they do find these things- towns and all that- and it presents a unique set of problems; the rate of technological advancement in man is staggering- it’s an e^x curve with respect to time and if they find a Roman town and maybe Singapore, they may show similar dates on the radio carbon dates- what would they make of that? Would they discover that the Romans had poisoned their air with lead with their lead mines and we, now poison our air using CO₂. What would they make of that? Would they attribute these changes in chemicals to a “natural process”? And both Singapore and Italy lie close to plate boundaries on the Earth.

Let the opposite be true. Let the future beings not find our towns and cities, and bits of our civilization. What would they picture us as? There would be no apes to compare us with, as we are on our way to destroy the apes before we die out anyways- would they used future monkeys for behavioural reference? Would they adduce that we swung from trees, in the buff, making weird “oogie oogie” noises, eat lice as a part of grooming and fight over bananas? Would we be seen as the equivalent of the great migratory herds of odd- toed and even- toed ungulates (cattle, horses, pigs, deer etc etc) that populate the plains and not the apex predators that we really are? Would they believe us to be something that we aren’t? And that produces a more pertinent question- given that most DNA is destroyed during fossilization, how do we know we are right when it comes to predicting behaviour of animals that have maybe around 85-95% of their DNA matching with extant species (even make it 98%, that’s the amount of DNA a chimp shares with us- we just aren’t the same, are we?)?