You stay away from my patents on wookie slippers that look like human feet.

Brb gonna go patent my own self worth in case it ever comes into existence.

You can but in practise you would have an immensely hard time enforcing that.

People have taken patents out for FTL drives but if one is ever invented it would be pretty difficult to claim that they have the rights to the invention.

Its a frequent idea but I don't think there's any supporting evidence from people I've talked to.

I think if a small community existed with houses, it might be permanently unknowable. If a widespread civilization with stone and wood construction existed we would certainly have found some evidence.

Though I think stone and wood construction came very late even for humans. I don't remember my anthropology class well but its suggested based on hunter gatherers humans often had a sort of nomadic foraging/hunting society until about 10,000 years ago when permanent agricultural settlements started developing.

Like humans are kind of weak and soft, we walk funny, we're omnivorous endurance pack hunters and fishers. Like in terms of mammals we're very weird. In the larger animal kingdom we're pretty weird but maybe not as weird as like mollusks, birds, and crabs where evolution also seemed to have done a series of back-to-back rapid changes in evolutionary pressure by sort of creating and occupying an uninhabited niche in the environment.

I especially am fond of the idea that like "crabification" there's like a "birdification" and a "hominidification" evolutionary process based on occupying a series of vacant ecological niches that step into each other. So if something like that is true it might be more visible in the fossil record.