Humans were not around 65 million yrs ago. A distant cousin of the human was “perhaps” just starting to stand erect about 5 million yrs ago.
If the dinosaurs hadn’t been taken out by a meteorite, mammals STILL would have dominated in time. Bigger brains and a different way to process thought, made mammals superior to cold blooded beasts.
If I’m pulling the right stuff out of my ass, mammals were at the tree shrew/rats eating bugs and dino eggs stage. I’m sure an actual biologist will be along shortly to tell us at what point primates appeared, and at what point apes appeared, but I believe Graeme is at least in the ball park for when upright walking apes were getting started.
That’s actually pretty interesting. I’m not sure if the cold-blooded/warm-blooded dinosaur debate is settled yet, so just saying that mammals had a higher metabolism may not be sufficient reason to believe mammals would have outcompeted the dinos. But either way if dinosaurs had survived I imagine that mammals would have had a slower go of it as they would have had to compete in all niches. As it was, when the dinos got the finger the nascent mammals were in a good position to expand into niches and out compete other types of animals that were trying to expand into those [empty at the time] niches as well.
What are you hoping to debate here? Do you believe that this is somehow contradictory to evolution, or that it supports creationism? Where is the story of the world-wide impact in the Bible? You can’t accept evidence when it suits your beliefs and then deny that same evidence when it refutes them.
Most dinosaurs did probably die out fairly quickly after the asteroid struck. There were no humans or hominids or hominoids at that time. Mammals of the period were small mouse sized critters. After the dinosaurs were wiped out, it was several millions of years before anything remotely human in appearance shows up in the fossil record.
In short, a quick extinction of the dinos after an impact is pretty much the scenario that has been found to be most consistent with observations over the past twenty years. It is, however, always good to have verification of the time scale involved.
At the time of the Chicxulub impact there existed at least one species we characterize as a primate. Purgatorius was about squirrel-sized and seems to have occupied the same niche that tree-rodents hold today.
Dinosaurs had dominated the world for a hundred and sixty-five million years. They had already squeaked through three major extinctions. If any of the larger species had survived the K-T event, I am sure that mammals would have been kept as nocturnal insectivores, just like Nature intended…
WHAT EFFECT DID THIS IMPACT HAVE ON THE FLINTSTONES!!???
Seriously, were Fred and Barney okay? Did they have to eat Dino during the worldwide havoc that must have ensued? Did pebbles and Bam-Bam reach adulthood? Inquiring minds want to know!
Incidentally, Niles Eldredge discusses the idea of what would have happened to mammals if the meteor had missed us a little bit in his new book, The Triumph of Evolution and the Failure of Creationism. If I recall (I don’t have it handy), his basic statement was similar to DrF’s here. If they had not had the openings to move into, mammals would probably not have come to dominate. It was only when all the different areas were opened up by the loss of the dinos that somebody else could move in. The mammals took their shot.
[ol]
[li]We’re not sure dinosaurs were cold-blooded.[/li][li]The dinosaur genus Troodon had a very large brain for its size (the brain as so large it left an impression on the inside of fossilized Troodon skulls). This large brain mass was most likely used for processing visual information, to help Troodon hunt in the dim twilight. It is not inconceivable that, had the K-T boundary event not occurred, Troodon could have evolved into a really-big-brained, reasoning, toolmaking species that posted messages to electronic message boards.[/li][/ol]