You appear to fundamentally misunderstand not just how how evolution operates, but what evolution is.
Evolution is just a process of change. It’s not directed and it doesn’t have a goal. Humans aren’t more evolved than any other species, or better than any other species. Humanity isn’t something that evolution works towards. We are one short-lived evolutionary experiment. There is absolutely no reason to believe that anything remotely like us would have evolved had our lineage become extinct.
Ecological niches are terms used to describe the portion of productivity space that the animal exploits. A nice doesn’t have any objective existence. If the nice isn’t occupied then it simply fails to exists. Just because a niche *potentially *exists, that doesn’t mean that anything is going to fill it. The bat niche, for example, was free for thousands of millions of years, and nothing filled it. The niche itself was created by bats, it wasn’t some sort of yawning vacuum that demanded filling. So nothing would occupy humanity’s niche. If humans didn’t exist then the niche would cease to exist. The ecological roles of humans would have been filled by multiple other species, just as it was before our species came into existence. Baboons, elephants, meerkats, sundry birds and so forth would all exploit the available energy that wasn’t being exploited by humans.
I’m also not sure that you appreciate how short 70, 00 years in in evolutionary terms. In 70, 00 years nothing has changed. 70, 00 years ago humans were still humans, lions were still lions, baboons were still baboons. Evenif evolution worked the way you think it does, you are not going to get radical changes that turn lions into people in 70, 000 years. 70 million years, maybe just, 70, 00 years, no way.
It would be largely unrecognisable. While the gross lanforms would still exist, the ecosystems and climate would be so radicaly altered that I doubt that even most ecologists would recognise where they were if simply plonked down on such a world.
With no human hunting and no human fire, the extent of forest would be radically different. The elephants and other megafauna would remain the primary biotic contraint on forest and grassland distribution. Much of Africa would remain a forest-savanna mosaic. The Sahara would presumably r4emian savanna woodland rather than desert, With no human influence trees would be free to repopulate North America following the glacial retreat, and most of the continent would be forest. Australia and Madagascar would have remained largely covered in rainforest and monsoon forest, just as they were before humans arrived.
And of course the megafaunal species associated with these ecosystems would have remained. North America would still have its camels and hunting bears and cheetahs and horses and ground sloths. Australai would still have its short-faced kangaroos and diprotodons. Madagascar would still have its giant lemurs and tortoises and lion-sized mongooses. Europe would still have its elephants and rhinos and lions.
The extent to which humans have altered the ecology of the world, and through that the climate, is only just being understood now. It’s appearing more and more like every major ecological and climatic shift since the last ice age has either been caused or exacerbated by humanity. Remove humans and the planet would b unrecognisable.
Octopii? What the fuck is an Octopius?
The same, of course, can be said for hominoids.
Nope. That idea pretty much died 50 years ago. Hominids developed our basic body plan long before we were using tools. IOW our toll use was permitted by our physical development, not the other way around. We are physically basically the same as Australopithecines, who didn’t use tools. All the major changes have been mental.
