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Could aliens work out if a human or an ape built the tomb they lie in?

If these future visitors were advanced enough to travel to Earth, says one reader, then they would be likely to have the technology to enable them to work this out

R1D8PY Silverback western lowland gorilla sitting down to eat at Zoo Atlanta in Atlanta, Georgia. (USA)

If visitors to our planet in millions of years found fossils of a Homo sapiens and another great ape in an elaborate tomb, would they be able to prove which one built it?

Abhranil Dasgupta
Kolkata, India

If extraterrestrial visitors have the ability to travel for multiple light years, they must have harnessed tremendous energy to accomplish this feat. This would make them a type II civilisation on the hypothetical Kardashev scale, able to harness the power of their star.

If this is the case, then we should also ponder their mental and physical prowess, such as their sense of intuition. Even a type I civilisation – one that can access and store all the energy on its planet – would be able to harness mental and spiritual abilities far greater than present-day humans. Who can say that civilisations that are type I or above can’t reach levels of intuitive and cognitive capabilities that allow them to determine which remains in the tomb belong to which entity?

That, added to their potential technological advances, could lead them to ascertain the creator of the tomb via geological, biological and chronological tests.

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