User blog comment:James12708/How could no one know about the Reapers/@comment-5379655-20120816083418

Well, the Reapers did a really good job at covering their tracks that's for sure. They completely wipe out each civilization and unless the victims have the foresight to leave warnings for the next cycle, there's not a whole lot that points to the Reapers. Sure, there's a lot of evidence, such as all of the abandoned cities and old scars of war, but the vast scale of time between cycles ensures that very little of use can be recovered. Plus, abandoned cities probably wouldn't make people instantly think "Giant sentient cuttlefish robots probably did it." Civilizations constantly rise and fall and since warfare has a history as long as sentient life, many people probably thought that the past civilizations were wiped out through warfare. Or maybe a deadly disease caused them to go extinct, or extinction events render their worlds unlivable. Even if you do leave a warning for the next cycle, like the protheans, it may not even be able to be interpreted by the new species. The Prothean's warnings almost weren't. Yeah, all the evidence is suspicious, but there's really no reason for the average person to believe that the Reapers are responsible. It's kind of similar to how we don't really know what happened to the Maya, since they essentially abandoned all of their cities at the height of their power. Time makes everything harder to understand.