I saw a study recently, unfortunately I can't locate it now. It discussed the possibility of there having been past civilizations on Earth, hundreds of millions or even billions of years ago. The conclusion was that this can't be entirely ruled out. It noted how few actual fossil remains we have for what we know of dinosaurs, and that there's a lot of space left in those gaps for all the evidence to have been destroy…
It's incredibly improbable. While much of the planet's surface is recycled constantly, there are also huge swaths of land that are billions of years old and haven't changed enough to hide evidence of complex society. Dinosaur fossils are rare, but not that rare. Tiny ones are abundant. If all life on earth ceased today, you could come back here in a billion years and find plenty of evidence everywhere. Maybe it's not…
Do you have any examples? The article in the sibling comment to yours directly states that the oldest large-scale swath of land (in the Negev Desert) only dates to 1.8 million years.