From: Technotranscendence (neptune@mars.superlink.net)
Date: Sat May 30 1998 - 21:03:56 MDT
At 12:14 PM 5/29/98 -0400, Michael Lorrey <retroman@together.net> wrote:
>> >And a big meteor ended the reign--saurs. I heard that if the meteor did not
>> >wipe them out (if they hadnt all become extinct), humans couldnt have
become,
>> >is this true?
>>
>> Unknown. Does anyone on this list claim this is the case and have a sound
>> argument to back it up?
>
>Essentially, since most ecological niches were occupied by very successful
>dinosaur species, the only niches in which mammals occpied were as small rodent
>types. Only once the meteor wiped out the previous occupants of those
niches could
>mammals develop to occupy them. Only then could the top predator position be
>taken by human beings, millions of years later.
This is a start, though it is a highly intuitive argument with some
problems. For
instance, it is debatable that humans were the top predator species until long
after they came to be. There seems to be some evidence that early humans
were scavengers. Even though many predators resort to scavenging, if humans
were scavenging, is there any reason to believe that had humans coexisted
with dinosuars, they could not just as easily scavenged off of the latter?
There is more to it than this, but I'm moving tomorrow, so I've to run.
Cheers!
Daniel Ust
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