• Fedizen@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      Yes but only because McDonald Douglas didn’t exist yet. If you do find evidence of them having jet aircraft we might be able to invalidate some patents under prior art.

  • plyth@feddit.org
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    1 day ago

    What made evolution accelerate so that dinosaur evolution took so long, but turning little mammals into humans was fast?

    • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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      17 hours ago

      From the last dinosaurs to the first humans was 66 million years, it wasn’t that fast.

      What is weird is that humans are so intelligent. It’s much easier to evolve big teeth and ripping claws to make you the dominant species then it is to evolve a highly complex brain.

      It can’t have been the extinction of the dinosaurs that had that impetus because by the time the first proto humans were around any effects of the asteroid impact would have long since dissipated. So there must have been some other threat that arose that was dangerous enough to require us to evolve to survive it, but was slow burning enough that it gave time for that evolution to happen. It also left no evidence.

      • mika_mika@lemmy.world
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        1 hour ago

        It’s because Ancient Aliens came and gave us knowledge to speed up the growth of our early civilizations.

      • vaultdweller013@sh.itjust.works
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        13 hours ago

        I think theres growing consensus that tool use itself led to us becoming more intelligent, basically the group of great apes that humans and chimps came from that led to humans started to use tools at increasing rates which caused a feedback loop. Tools allow better resource exploitation while conserving energy and gaining more energy this basically caused evolution to throw everything into the dump stat that is intelligence which further worsened the feedback loop.

        • bryndos@fedia.io
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          2 hours ago

          Ditching our thagomizers for the ability to craft giant iron flails.

          Min-maxing to ruin the game for everyone.

    • Denjin@feddit.uk
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      1 day ago

      Mass extinctions promote rapid expansion and diversification of surviving species into newly available niches.

      • chatokun@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 day ago

        There’s also a Hypothesis iirc that this rapid expansion also lowered our life span. Longevity Bottleneck Hypothesis though I think this one includes dinosaurs hunting mammals, and maybe Disposable Soma Theory.

        Huh, the second one could probably be used to explain elves in fantasy: long life, low reproduction rate.

  • kibiz0r@midwest.social
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    1 day ago

    Chronologically, sure. But are years really the appropriate measure of accuracy here? Biological evolution moves a lot slower than cultural or technological evolution does.

    • Fedizen@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      Hold on. Dinosaurs might of had like some kind of post communist utopian society. They might have been more culturally developed than humans.

      • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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        17 hours ago

        I tried asking a geologist this question once and just got a funny look.

        But let’s say for the sake of arguement that dinosaurs did have a civilisation, if that civilisation was on the level of mediaeval technology then would there be any evidence after millennia and an asteroid impact? If we’re talking about houses made of wood and roads made of cobblestone and no refined metals, would we be able to tell?

        There’s an idea that they may have been prior civilisations but they will wiped out and never left any evidence. It would certainly explain why humans are so much more intelligent than the rest of the animals. We aren’t actually special at all, we are just the latest iteration of biological inevitability.

        • Fedizen@lemmy.world
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          15 hours ago

          Its a frequent idea but I don’t think there’s any supporting evidence from people I’ve talked to.

          I think if a small community existed with houses, it might be permanently unknowable. If a widespread civilization with stone and wood construction existed we would certainly have found some evidence.

          Though I think stone and wood construction came very late even for humans. I don’t remember my anthropology class well but its suggested based on hunter gatherers humans often had a sort of nomadic foraging/hunting society until about 10,000 years ago when permanent agricultural settlements started developing.

          Like humans are kind of weak and soft, we walk funny, we’re omnivorous endurance pack hunters and fishers. Like in terms of mammals we’re very weird. In the larger animal kingdom we’re pretty weird but maybe not as weird as like mollusks, birds, and crabs where evolution also seemed to have done a series of back-to-back rapid changes in evolutionary pressure by sort of creating and occupying an uninhabited niche in the environment.

          I especially am fond of the idea that like “crabification” there’s like a “birdification” and a “hominidification” evolutionary process based on occupying a series of vacant ecological niches that step into each other. So if something like that is true it might be more visible in the fossil record.