Out of the 4.

54 billion years in which the earth has been in existence life took
nearly a billion years to come about. The atmosphere at this time was mostly n
itrogen and CO2, with water vapour, methane and ammonia declining and oxygen vir
tually non-existent. After about quarter of a billion years, life began using p
hotosynthesis and from that point onwards life started creating oxygen, however
it woud take another 2.5 billion years of photosythesis until there was enough o
xygen to allow the creation of an ozone layer without which multicellular life c
ould not evolve into complex enough lifeforms that had what could be properly de
scribed as a "nervous system" The reason for this is that without an ozone laye
r there is no protection against high levels of ultraviolet radiation. In other
words sunburn would be so high it would kill off any complex forms of life. On
ce we have an ozone layer, however, complex life evolves and given another half
a billion years and we've got fish. Another quarter of a billion years and we h
ave mammals. So, even though life has been around for quite some time (around 3
.6 billion years) as far as intelligence goes, most of it don't mean diddly-squa
t. Now even if we are willing to accept the possibility of reptilian life devel
oping the equivalent of what one might call culture, i.e. animals grouping toget
her in small herds in which members of those small herds are willing to sacrific
e themselves for the other members of the herd, then we could have the level of
co-operation between species members to organise themselves into anything comple
x enough for a civilization to evolve, but the earliest that this could have com
e about would have been around 250 million years. However, seeing as there is n
othing in the fossil record that shows that brain size didn't really begin to de
velop to large enough ratios for serious intelligence to take hold until the dev
elopment of simian life, and then only the latter part of those creature's evolu
tion, then I can't see how any kind of civilization could have come about until
the arrival of a subset of simians known as the genus "Homo". Even if a civiliz
ation arose hundreds of millions of years ago, this wouldn't of occurred overnig
ht, there would have been a gradual development from small brain to large brain
and add to that the the level of proliferation that a civilization would create,
then I can't see how there wouldn't be sometthing in the fossil record that wou
ld indicate any of this. Civilizations may rise and fall as rapidly as over tho
usands even hundreds of years, but the kind of evolutionary development that thi
s arises from takes millions, if not tens of millions of years and millions of y
ears of evolution creates billions of creatures, there would be something in the
fossil record surely. Looking at what the bonobos are capable of, I suppose th
ere's a possibility of simian life evolving enough for the development of civili
zations as far back as 2 million years. However, this is an estimation from the
standpoint, purely as an educated guess from a laypersons point of view. I may
be missing considerable information here relevant to brain, cognitive and psych
ological evolution. But as you can see, most of the time that life has been aro
und, the vast majority of that time was spent on preparing the earth's atmospher
e for oxygen production, 2.6 billion years used up there, and without oxygen, no
ozone, no ozone no multicellular life. So I am willing to accept that life cou
ld have evolved to a state capable of producing a civilization maybe about 1 mil
lion years ago and I am fully aware that civilizations rise and fall, but the on
ly thing that would lead to extinction would be either pollution or nuclear or b
io warfare. For a civilization to develop, the species first has to become biol
ogically dominant, otherwise it would be overrun by other species. Any civiliza
tion capable of developing that kind of complexity would have dominated the plan
et much like we have and the level of proliferation of that civilization would h
ave been totally global. We are talking about a civilization that would have ta
ken tens of thousands of years to develop and like I said the proliferation woul
d have been global, so where is the fossil record of a global species that would
have grown to at least tens of millions. At the moment the (fossil) record sho
ws only a slow evolution from reptile to mammal to simian to homosapien to homos
apien-sapien. Brain sizes don't appear to have arisen until around 250,000 year
s ago, however, I am also willing to accept that interglacial periods (vast (in
that they could disrupt a civilization, but minor compared to a proper ice age)

movements of ice between ice ages) of shifting icesheets could have wiped out ev
idence from a previously arisen civilization, but we are talking within the last
quarter of a million years. I'm willing to accept that humans may have develop
ed civilizations over the past few hundred thousand years, however, I have heard
that modern humans (homosapien-sapien as opposed to homosapien) had a higher de
gree of cognitive ability when it came to the ability to conceptualise. For exa
mple, a creature may be able to conceptualise to the extent that it can think ab
out itself, but that doesn't mean that it has the ability to think about itself
thinking about itself. There is an order of magnitude that differentiates betwe
en being able to think and being able to philosophise. Without philosophy there
's no mathematics and no engineering or technology, or at least no really comple
x technology and without that there's no chance of a civilisation taking hold, s
o, the question of how old can a complex civilisation be, is without doubt a can
of nemotode worms that may or may not glow in the dark.