10 Reasons Why Humans May Not Have Come From Earth
3. A Prison Planet?
One of Dr. Silver's slightly more esoteric theories is that the Earth may actually be a prison colony for a society of galactic beings.
It is apparently our naturally violent, vengeful, lustful, criminal natures that makes him think this. The fact that you don't often observe this kind of behaviour in the animal kingdom makes Silver think that it could well be because these are traits that come from a completely different race of people.
The theory is that we could have had our memories wiped and been dumped in a primitive backwater by a civilisation of space-faring beings as a sort of "cooling off" period, presumably after becoming too much of a menace to intergalactic society.
Perhaps they hoped that we would integrate with the natural world on a young planet and become a peaceful race of hunter-gatherers, or something.
But actually what happened is that we almost immediately wiped out the Neanderthals and set about transforming the Earth to suit our anti-social ways, so they left us here.
To be fair, given our earthbound history of shipping criminals off to somewhere out of sight and out of mind, this does sound like exactly the sort of thing we'd do if we ever became a planet-hopping race of pan-galactic beings. The question is, has it already happened?