The Doctor Who Writers Still Can't Read A Geological Timeline

[andraste]

In a way, it's sort of charming to see that the Doctor is as muddled as ever about the dating of Silurian civilization. You would think that a time traveller could count better.

In The Hungry Earth he clearly states that the Silurians are '300 million years' out of their comfort zone. This corresponds to neither the Silurian Period in pre-history nor to any time when bipedal reptiles are likely to have had a thriving civilisation. Earth did have early lizards then, but they wouldn't have had time to evolve into talking bipeds yet. Nor were there any apes. Calling them 'Eocenes' is only a bit less wrong - the Eocene Epoch ended a bit over thirty million years ago, so still no apes.

Since the Silurians recognise humans as a familiar type of primate and have clearly interacted with same at some point in their history, the most likely time for their civilisation to have thrived is the Miocene Epoch. (I did not figure this out myself, but the reasoning of Lance Parkin and Tat Wood makes sense to me.) This would put them somewhere between five and ten million years ago, a period of history where there were at least a hundred different ape species that could have raided their crops and been wiped out by plague in return.

Calling them 'homo reptilius' is just silly.