Would we recognize them if we did? If another civilization emerges 12000 years after our collapse and they advance in a completely different way technologically, would they have any idea what a phone was for? That's perhaps a bad example since a phone is obviously artificial, but the point is it's possible technology could evolve in completely different ways so as to be totally unrecognizable to what we have now. If that happened in the past who's to say they couldn't harness vibrations and more natural phenomenon?

Or, and this is more a thought exercise, what if their technology effected the world to the extent that what we think of as natural actually only functions that way due to their technology

Would we recognize them if we did? If another civilization emerges 12000 years after our collapse and they advance in a completely different way technologically, would they have any idea what a phone was for? That's perhaps a bad example since a phone is obviously artificial, but the point is it's possible technology could evolve in completely different ways so as to be totally unrecognizable to what we have now. If that happened in the past who's to say they couldn't harness vibrations and more natural phenomenon?