re: #74 silverdolphin

Hard to see any civilization arising without going through an extractive period.

Harry Harrison’s “West of Eden” books posited a descendant species of the dinosaurs (no Chicxulub impactor 65 million years ago) which used purely biological engineering to maintain their civilisation for millions of years without resource extraction. A predecessor species like that would have left little in the way of a record in geological strata and possibly no record in the fossil history.