Oldest evidence of life on land found in 3.48 billion-year-old Australian rocks - Fossils discovered in ancient hot spring deposits in the Pilbara have pushed back by 580 million years the earliest known evidence for microbial life on land. Ref. Source 7p.
Considering the unbelievable number of planets out there, there must be a few. The questions are, how much older or younger are those planets, how quickly did life develop and evolve there, and did it evolve into sapient life? According to this it took the better part of 3.4 billion years for us to come to pass. What if there is an older planet where sapience developed say a million years ago, a drop in the bucket when compared to our 3.4 billion years. They would be vastly more advanced.
Doesn't even necessarily need to be an older planet. There is some reason to believe certain dinosaurs might have been on the path to sapience when their extinction event hit.
If that didn't happen, and they took another 10-15 million years or so to hit the mark, sapient life could have developed on this planet 50 million years before schedule.
Yeah, I read a book a long time ago about what would have happened had the extinction event not occurred. In the book there were smart dinosaurs and our distant ancestors, the first humans… and the dinosaurs were very technologically advanced as compared to the humans. I could see in that length of time dinosaurs could have definitely become sapient… and then quite advanced.