We’re straying far from the original question, but even in your scenario, I think we’d recognize that an organism was purposely and intelligently modifying its environment if we studied it, just as we see that termites are not doing that, by studying them.
We could probably identify any given change, if we specifically knew to look for it, and if the organisms in question were alive today. But finding that change if we didn’t know what we were looking for would be much more difficult, and finding it millions of years after the species went extinct might well be completely impossible.
Or 13 billion years is the minimum needed time for the materials needed for intelligent, technological life to evolve.
If studied in depth, certainly, but a casual observer may not accord any particular intelligence or even recognize that the organism in question was exhibiting any volition we associate with tool usage. We’ve long overlooked the cognitive capacity of many animals on the assumption that their behaviors are instinctive only to later determine that they were learned adaptive behaviors.
In any case, we can agree that intelligence (by whatever definition) not some end goal of evolutionary development, only a trait that is occasionally developed by a minority of species, and for which the record of comparative success is uncertain. There are plenty of complex animal species that get by with pretty minimal intelligence, and of course, the plants, fungi, bacteria, archea, and algae that make up the bulk of the biomass of the planet have been enormously successful despite not having any kind of nervous system at all, much less a brain.
As for the question (and misapprehensions) of the o.p., the impact of the Chicxulub impactor on the Yucatán Peninsula may have locally heated the atmosphere to high temperature but the damage done was by occluding the sun due to suspended particles and smothering large portions of the Earth’s surface with debris which caused a dramatic shift in climate equilibrium. It is wrong to think of the dinosaurs and other species dying out en masse in a matter of a few days or weeks; although there were likely some mass die-offs as species lost food supplies, but the shift in conditions gave a competitive advantage to more adaptable species, the effects of which continued for hundreds of thousands of years as less adaptable species were outcompeted for scarce resources or failed to survive migration to resource-rich areas. Much is made of the extinction of a massive number of species (over 70% of known species) due to the K-Pg event, but it was also an opportunity for species to expand and develop in new ways. This kind of saltation event in the fossil record is seen over and over when an environmental condition or pressure undergoes a dramatic change, and like beginning a new type of exercise, it suddenly grants abilities (and pain) that you have not previously experienced. It is a critical part of overall evolutionary selective theory which gives rise to new and unanticipated forms without having to fall back on a “hopeful monster” mutation explanation for evolutionary change.
Stranger