# What if: No humans or other primates **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [September 10, 2011, 5:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-if-no-humans-or-other-primates/595798 "2011-09-10T05:07:35Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 10\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Namkcalb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/c89c15/32.png) [@Namkcalb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Namkcalb)\ **Post date:** [September 11, 2011, 2:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-if-no-humans-or-other-primates/595798/41 "2011-09-11T14:05:54Z")
> [@Apollon](#): > > Horses are right out. Their intelligence is far too low for them to evolve into anything remotely sentient, and their having hooves precludes them from ever evolving useful manipulators. [I’m going to tolerate and love the shit out of you](http://aquageek.net/media/posts/1107/pony/6.png)🙂 > [@Blake](#): > > Except that humans didn’t really occupy any niche, we created one. > > Humans in the “natural state” are just generalist omnivores. Our niche isn’t significantly different from that of foxes or pigs or bandicoots. So without humans there still isn’t any environmental niche for any other species to exploit. We were significantly seperate from them by being social, tool-using, permanently-in-heat, endurance hunters. Our social-nature, our intelligence and our manual dexterity logically led to tool-based civilisation when the surounding environment was appropriate. ---
**Author:** ![Blake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/a9a28c/32.png) [@Blake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blake)\ **Post date:** [September 11, 2011, 2:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-if-no-humans-or-other-primates/595798/42 "2011-09-11T14:31:26Z")
> [@Namkcalb](#): > > We were significantly seperate from them by being social, tool-using, permanently-in-heat, endurance hunters. > > Our social-nature, our intelligence and our manual dexterity logically led to tool-based civilisation when the surounding environment was appropriate. Exactly, we created the niche that we occupy virtue of our characteristics. Now you’re starting to get it. Imagine that, right now in some parallel dimension, flying monkeys have just evolved. They are significantly separated from competing creatures by being warm blooded, social, having opposeable thumbs, flying and so forth. They are at least as ecologically separate from any competing creatures as humans are from our competitors. Now fast forward a few million years to when flying monkey descendants are the dominant life form on Earth. A flying monkey asks the question “If all flying monkeys had become extinct, what creature would occupy our niche”. Can you answer that question? You are alive right now at the very time when the history’s diverged, and of course you can not answer that question. And you can not answer it because the flying monkey niche doesn’t exist in this world. The niche is created by the species that fills it. While bats and possums and non-flying monkeys are all obvious competitors with flying monkeys, they no more occupy the flying monkey niche than meerkats occupied the human niche. These are cases where the species \*creates \*the niche. It’s not just impossible, but actually pointless, to speculate on what creature in this world might evolve into a flying, social, omnivorous, dextrous, tropical, arboreal omnivore. There is no reason at all to believe any such creature will ever evolve. And it is equally pointless, for the same reason, to speculate on what creatures might have evolved into social, tool-using, permanently-in-heat, endurance hunters in the absence of humanity. There is no reason at all to believe any such creature would have ever evolve. Neither of these niches actually exists as unoccupied energy space. These are niches that can only be created when a species with those characteristics actually comes into existence. There is nothing driving a species to **evolve** those characteristics. ---
**Author:** ![treis](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/bc79bd/32.png) [@treis](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/treis)\ **Post date:** [September 11, 2011, 3:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-if-no-humans-or-other-primates/595798/43 "2011-09-11T15:53:20Z")
> [@Blake](#): > > Basically, yeah. It’s the same process that’s been well established for Australia and Madagascar. These regions are all what are known as anticyclonic zones: weak monsoonal climates, in simple terms they are potentially subject to monsoonal weather patterns, but that can be broken up very easily by fairly minor fluctuations in temperature and humidity. One of the key attributes of these regions is that rain begets rain, and drought begets drought. Wet years tend to be followed by increasingly wet years and dry years by increasingly dry years until the weather system undergoes a spectacular collapse and resets itself to another phase. What is your cite for prehistoric humans so drastically affecting the climate? ---
**Author:** ![Sailboat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sailboat/32/461_2.png) [@Sailboat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sailboat)\ **Post date:** [September 12, 2011, 4:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-if-no-humans-or-other-primates/595798/44 "2011-09-12T16:49:00Z")
> [@Blake](#): > > Octopii? What the fuck is an Octopius? Obviously a typo – he is referring to the octoprius, which gets more miles per gallon of ink. ---
**Author:** ![Brandus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/898d66/32.png) [@Brandus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Brandus)\ **Post date:** [September 12, 2011, 5:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-if-no-humans-or-other-primates/595798/45 "2011-09-12T17:17:05Z")
I vote for elephants. They were already on their way to expanding across the globe before humans put a stop to that. They’re long lived, with the potential to pass down information across the generations. Plus they have a dexterous trunk that can manipulate objects. ---
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [September 12, 2011, 5:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-if-no-humans-or-other-primates/595798/46 "2011-09-12T17:56:07Z")
> [@Brandus](#): > > I vote for elephants. They were already on their way to expanding across the globe before humans put a stop to that. They’re long lived, with the potential to pass down information across the generations. Plus they have a dexterous trunk that can manipulate objects. Plus they use tools, are self-aware, and use complex vocalizations to communicate with each other. ---
**Author:** ![foolsguinea](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/foolsguinea/32/14751_2.png) [@foolsguinea](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/foolsguinea)\ **Post date:** [September 12, 2011, 8:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-if-no-humans-or-other-primates/595798/47 "2011-09-12T20:15:50Z")
Maybe something like raccoons or a panda offshoot. But elephants are a good bet. They’re kind of intellect-based, or at least memory-based, to begin with. ---
**Author:** ![Lemur866](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lemur866/32/434_2.png) [@Lemur866](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lemur866)\ **Post date:** [September 12, 2011, 8:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-if-no-humans-or-other-primates/595798/48 "2011-09-12T20:49:05Z")
It really is a freaking crime that we’re down to two species of Proboscidians, and both species are in big trouble. 70,000 years ago there were elephants all over the world. If you asked visiting aliens whether the monkeys with the broken rocks or mammoths ruled the Earth, they’d have answered mammoths with no hesitation. That said, I agree completely with Blake. With no hominids, there’s no reason any other species would become a tool user. It’s not like it could never happen, but there weren’t any large brained tool users for the first 649 million years of multicellular life on Earth, so if hominids had went extinct it’s not like any other species would have “taken our place”. Our place is “large generalist omnivore”, not “large-brained tool user”. And there are dozens of species that fill that niche already–bears, pigs, racoons, other primates, foxes, dozens of other medium sized Carnivora alone, large rodents, and on and on. There is something to the idea of a “niche”, and it certainly is true that animals that fill the same niche often tend to superficially resemble each other. But when you look at anteaters, pangolins, armadillos, aardvarks, and echidnas you can see the convergence–long snout, reduced teeth, long tongue, claws. But if pangolins went extinct you wouldn’t see aardvarks evolving scales to take their place. To take another example, there used to exist large clawed herbivores–chalicotheres. There are all kinds of theories about their diet and habits. But nobody knows for sure, because they are now all extinct. And it turns out, in South America there was a creature that was completely unrelated to these clawed ungulates, but evolved a similar appearance and lifestyle: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:South\_American\_Homalodotherium.jpg](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:South_American_Homalodotherium.jpg). So, whoah, two unrelated creatures that evolved to fill the same niche. Except, both are extinct now. So there is definately a niche for a large clawed ungulate out there. Except, what creature will evolve to fill that niche? It’s very likely that the world will never see another large clawed ungulate, that no such creature will ever evolve again, despite the fact that it already happened twice. So there’s no reason to suppose that another creature would evolve to become social tool users if humans never evolved, or become extinct. Yes, it could happen, but there’s no reason to think it would. ---
**Author:** ![Bosda\_Di\_Chi\_of\_Tricor](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bosda_di_chi_of_tricor/32/16845_2.png) [@Bosda\_Di\_Chi\_of\_Tricor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bosda_Di_Chi_of_Tricor)\ **Post date:** [September 12, 2011, 9:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-if-no-humans-or-other-primates/595798/49 "2011-09-12T21:19:51Z")
> [@foolsguinea](#): > > Maybe something like raccoons or a panda offshoot. > > . [Panda Offshoot](http://images.cheezburger.com/completestore/2010/6/16/04210924-3734-4ce2-9b21-98709e7ba7bf.jpg)? 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![Namkcalb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/c89c15/32.png) [@Namkcalb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Namkcalb)\ **Post date:** [September 13, 2011, 10:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-if-no-humans-or-other-primates/595798/50 "2011-09-13T10:53:57Z")
> [@Brandus](#): > > with the potential to pass down information across the generations. Yes, this is important, I would rank animals that educate their young and [slowly]increase the complexity of their tools over the generation as as probable civilisation creators. Have any non Homo Sapiens ever done this? Have captive apes ever done this? [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-if-no-humans-or-other-primates/595798.md?page=2)