I think it’s reasonable to ask that in the case that rebirth is real, why didn’t literally any monk write down or give us anything that provides evidence of a more distant past like dinosaurs or even more recent past like some Native American societies like Aztecs and the practices that happen there.
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How do you know they didn’t?
I think a reasonable response to that comes from sn56.31
“In the same way, there is much more that I have directly known but have not explained to you. What I have explained is a tiny amount. And why haven’t I explained it? Because it’s not beneficial or relevant to the fundamentals of the spiritual life. It doesn’t lead to disillusionment, dispassion, cessation, peace, insight, awakening, and extinguishment. That’s why I haven’t explained it.
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Sure, but LATER monks DID proselytize and care about it and DID philosophize and write all sorts of things down, mysticism, philosophy, history, etc. Surely one of them would’ve mentioned something like this?
Well, are you aware of any Buddhist texts which mention things like this?
I think it’s a good question, and I don’t have a full answer for it.
But I think one factor is that we can only interpret and express things for which we have a context.
Consider the accounts of young children talking about their past lives. Usually it is in a human birth, and often in a place not far from where they are now. They can understand concepts like, “I used to live in that house”, or “my mommy had red hair”.
But what if they were a scorpion in their past life? 
Suppose they had genuine scorpion memories arising, what would they be like? How would they even be recognized as memories? How would they make sense of them? I think they wouldn’t, it’d just be some vague feelings or impressions, maybe an echo of an image in a dream. They wouldn’t have any way of connecting that impression with the conventional idea of a “scorpion”.
If you look at how the Buddha described memories of past lives, “I lived there, that was my name, that’s what I ate, that’s my experience of pleasure and pain”, you can see it’s mostly concerned with immediate details of the life they were living. Which is, after all, the reality of most people’s lives. What matters is their family, their village. How much of their consciousness is taken up with thoughts of “here I am living in an Andean civilization characterized by such and such forms of governance and architecture”? Even if such experiences were expressed, it would mostly just be life in a village, or as a hunter, or some other context.
It’s not so obvious that the things that would interest us are the things that interest most people when living their lives.
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are you aware of the formal name of the fallacy you are invoking?
What fallacy are you talking about? I’m aware of absence of evidence != evidence of absence, but I’m saying that probabilistically, its reasonable to think that someone would write something like this down given all the things Buddhist monks and scholars have written down in the past.
True and I thank you for your thoughtful reply, but could they not describe child sacrifice (common custom), or maybe the weird creatures (not themselves but other dinosaurs) that dinosaurs must’ve seemed like, especially in those mythical times it would probably be believed in.
Buddhism’s reality touches the mind when the reality of Enlightenment is ascertained. Even though I may not be Enlightened, I have enough in my practice to fully understand that Buddha was Enlightened, and knowing such, the rest of the Dhamma comes as accurate.
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This is in fact depicted in a number of Jataka and similar stories.
Well, there were no humans at that time, so it would only be possible to recollect another animal life.
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Well, there were no humans at that time, so it would only be possible to recollect another animal life.
Okay, but that’s because child sacrifice still existed in societies that Ancient India interacted with like Achaemenids. It would’ve spread around in tales. None of them as far as I know, describe any UNIQUE and specific custom of child sacrifice that would remind of the New World.
Well, there were no humans at that time, so it would only be possible to recollect another animal life.
I meant that let’s say in year 900 CE, someone recollects the memory of being a dinosaur and look at other dinosaurs. They’d describe these other dinosaurs as they’d seem weird from our human recollected point of view.
Buddhism’s reality touches the mind when the reality of Enlightenment is ascertained.
And how do you ascertain the reality of Enlightenment? Through practices? But practices are just internal changes to your mind, they’re not external and say nothing about nibbana. Nibbana is not ONLY about changes in the mind.
I have enough in my practice to fully understand that Buddha was Enlightened, and knowing such, the rest of the Dhamma comes as accurate.
That wouldn’t necessarily follow though. And likewise, the same could be said with any other religion, Hinduism included.
It requires to explain the entirety of how one views the Dhamma, but think of it in the sense that it emotionally, psychologically, ideologically, and then from the internal truth factor, Metta, it is making sense. It’s like saying you know you Love someone, you just know it, in the same way of Wisdom and Metta there is a way to actually know that Buddha was Enlightened.
right! so that is the fallacy you are invoking.
Your “probabilistic” argument is nothing of the sort, it’s just; “I find dinosaurs interesting, so why haven’t dinosaurs been written about by the awakened?”
There’s no probabilistic reasoning going on, if anything, given the nature of the religion it would seem probable to expect the exact opposite; dinosaurs having nothing to do with awakening so therefore unlikely to be written about by people interested in awakening, not dinosaurs.
Your basically saying “I’m aware of absence of evidence != evidence of absence but isn’t this absence of evidence evidence of absence? (probably?)”.
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Buddhist monks and scholars have written about many many things which have nothing to do with awakening, so what you’re saying makes no sense. Surely, they could’ve written down about some plants, locations or medicine from other places, or something like that.
Could you give an example of the “many things which have nothing to do with awakening” that Buddhist monks write about?
It’s possible that unrevealed Buddhas are paleontologists…
Arguments about all sorts of technical nonsense like in logic, epistemology, things they saw along their travels (e.g. when Buddhist monks travelled), different myths, theories, etc.
Actually (non bird) dinosaurs existed and died out 10s of millions of years before humans existed on Earth.
Unless you mean a past life as a dinosaur?