Question If not humans, what?

Nov 18, 2019
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Let's speculate. If humans had not arisen from a random, blessed (or cursed) tribe of apes, if we had been wiped out by predators, a smallish meteor or plague...

What creature would be the most dominant on earth, do you think? The most in control and potentially able to terraform it as we have?

Feel free to give this concept a few dozen million more years to allow for further evolution, and then propose what life form would fill the vacuum.

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.
Griff
 

Tia Ghose

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Nov 20, 2019
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Probably one of the other myriad apelike creatures could have evolved enough to significantly modify the environment. Or we could go Douglas Adams on this one and say mice and dolphins would finally have free rein to modify the planet. :)
 
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Dec 11, 2019
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This assumes other hominid species such as Neanderthals and Denisovans who co-existed for hundreds of thousands of years with modern homo sapiens (us) were also wiped out. If not, one or the other (or both) of those species would probably have become dominant, most likely the Neanderthals with actually bigger brains than we have. Assuming of course that the same reason homo sapiens became extinct did not affect the other existing hominid species at the time of "our" extinction.

Interestingly, we homo sapiens almost DID become extinct back around 60,000 years ago when we all lived in central Africa. Severe regional climate change at one point apparently reduced the entire human population there to between two and ten thousand individuals. So human extinction was actually a near thing. Apparently, this didn't affect Neanderthals and Denisovans who were mostly living on the European continent at the time and survived for tens of thousands more years until they were (likely) done in by us.
 
:LOL:
This assumes other hominid species such as Neanderthals and Denisovans who co-existed for hundreds of thousands of years with modern homo sapiens (us) were also wiped out. If not, one or the other (or both) of those species would probably have become dominant, most likely the Neanderthals with actually bigger brains than we have. Assuming of course that the same reason homo sapiens became extinct did not affect the other existing hominid species at the time of "our" extinction.

Interestingly, we homo sapiens almost DID become extinct back around 60,000 years ago when we all lived in central Africa. Severe regional climate change at one point apparently reduced the entire human population there to between two and ten thousand individuals. So human extinction was actually a near thing. Apparently, this didn't affect Neanderthals and Denisovans who were mostly living on the European continent at the time and survived for tens of thousands more years until they were (likely) done in by us.

Must have been all those CO2's by the humans for the climate change.:D:ROFLMAO:
 
Jul 25, 2020
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Darwin actually said, Man, like Ape, evolves and adapts to an ever changing enviroment.

What creature would be the most dominant on earth? Probably the one that science claims is the oldest. . . .the cockroach. All they need to do is become poisonous, crap on our food, and there goes the population who doesn't think to wash their fresh produce, or cook their meat, or food thoroughly