Could humans - primitive ones, not modern civilized ones - have survived the K/T extinction event ?

In My Humble Opinion
21

I’ve been having a look at this. as was mentioned the K-T event wasn’t even the most destructive.
A repeat of the K-Pg would offer the following problems.

Wipeout around the impact site - fire, blast wave, ejection material, gases.
Mega-mega tsunamis
Gobal earthquakes at least 9 on the Richter scale everywhere.
Shock induced volcanic eruptions, possibly lasting hundreds of thousands of years.
Global firestorm caused by hot debris sent into the atmosphere.
Vaporisation of rock at impact reacting with ozone layer for increased UV
Vaporisation of water and limestone giving greenhouse gases.
Burning of biomass - forests, grassland, peat etc - more CO2
Acid rain.
Acidification of ocean, death of sea life.
Oceanic anoxia leading to proliferation of sulphur dioxide producing bacteria, deadly clouds of gas wafting over land.
Blocking out of sunlight - nuclear winter style.
Cold.
Insufficient light for photosynthesis.

One thing I haven’t found yet is the effect on ice caps. If a firestorm or subsequent greenhouse effect melts the caps then we can get alteration of oceanic currents I would think.

Fun eh ?

22

The BBC have just published this article on a beaver-sized mammal that survived.

23

I haven’t been able to find it either, but I have read that for five million years after the event the biggest land animal wasn’t bigger than some small limit, like 10 or 20 kilos. I forget the exact figure.

The late Cretaceous was a greenhouse world, with temperatures much higher than today. There was no ice anywhere in the world. The Antarctic ice cap didn’t begin to form until millions of years after the event, probably sometime in the Oligocene.

24

Well, the impactor “set the atmosphere on fire” and threw molten glass completely around the earth. One test I saw, conducted under conditions assumed to be analogous to the worldwide firestorm, set the temperature at ground level at 1500 degrees F.

At least that would have fired any clay pots we were working on.

25

Here’s a paper on the evolution of maximum mammal size from Science, there’s a clear ‘shelf’ after the K-Pg extinction that lasts at least 5 million years but it’s more on the order of 50kg than 10-20. And towards the end of that period, mammals were definitely growing in size - Pantodonts were already small-sheep-sized (45kg) within two million years after K-Pg, and way biggerafter 5.