Sure, and the article mentions other possible signs of civilization as well, then it goes on to say:
> So it might take both dedicated and novel detection methods to find evidence of a truly short-lived event in ancient sediments. In other words, if you’re not explicitly looking for it, you might not see it. That recognition was, perhaps, the most concrete conclusion of our study.
I'm not bullish on pre-historic civilization, and neither is the article, but the takeaway is we may not have reason to expect that we'd have found these tiny industrialized traces without a search aimed specifically at them. As far as I know, such searches have not been carried out in earnest to date.
We've put old rocks under the electronic microscope. That's how we identified billion year old cyanobacteria fossils. While there is no readily available comprehensive record of who searched for microfossils by looking at what old rocks, with or without a microscope, it's not like it's a new idea.
I feel like we're talking past each other here. The very first sentence of your link says "The cyanobacteria have an extensive fossil record." In the next paragraph it says "Cyanobacteria are among the easiest microfossils to recognize. Morphologies in the group have remained much the same for billions of years..."
So not a truly short-lived event in ancient sediments then.
> So it might take both dedicated and novel detection methods to find evidence of a truly short-lived event in ancient sediments. In other words, if you’re not explicitly looking for it, you might not see it. That recognition was, perhaps, the most concrete conclusion of our study.
I'm not bullish on pre-historic civilization, and neither is the article, but the takeaway is we may not have reason to expect that we'd have found these tiny industrialized traces without a search aimed specifically at them. As far as I know, such searches have not been carried out in earnest to date.