Does anyone have any other theories for artifacts found in 300 million year old geologic formations, coal, etc.? I would love to hear them
I've theorized on this a few times here. I'll go over it again. I think there are revealings that occur in popular media and their relation to ancient mythologies.
Basically (maybe) Earth is a type of farm. Every 50,000 - several million years, humans or their past variants are harvested to feed the tastes or energy needs of a kind of interdimensional consciousness. It is a neither evil nor benevolent consciousness and behavior in the same way that a Lion's kill of prey is neither evil nor benevolent. It just is.
Every harvest they may change the genetic makeup of those they harvest for whatever reason. Perhaps to weed out a less "spiritually" aptly able and more domesticated product than the harvest before it.
Modern popular media reveals this in a variety of stories, and movies, etc.
In the Matrix,
Zion is destroyed many times over eons. Humans are interestingly a form of energy subsistence. They are harvested by floating tentacled Sentinel jellyfish. The artificial reality metaphor is similar to the interdimensional theory.
The harvesting itself is explored in the new adaptation of War of the Worlds, the Day the Earth Stood Still (DTESS), Knowing and Indiana Jones: Crystal Skulls, among others.
At the end of the last installment of Crystal Skulls, an erasure effect involving the breakdown of things into their most basic, coveres up the evidence of past. DTESS has a similar effect with the microscopic nanotechnology-lite devices that seek out what they determine are artificial structures, and dismantle them, before themselves being degradeable into the natural environment- leaving no evidence whatsoever of a past human civilization.
Sometimes these harvests aren't completely successful in eradicating the artificial structures. Especially those underground.
Occasionally wars or massacres are conducted intermittently at certain latitudes, times, and conjunctions in order to feed as a sustainment. They are periodic offerings before the main dish / harvesting. This is the why behind occultic rituals involving human deaths of any scale. This is where our sense of evil comes from. A betrayal of your own kind.
Scientology may touch this mythology referring to the burden and traumas of the souls of those beings slaughtered on Earth in the past.
So many more interesting past mythologies and ideas support the idea - but that would take a book to explore.