Timeline for How long would it take for a new intelligent species to evolve if humans disappeared?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
16 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jul 21, 2015 at 20:46 | comment | added | WhatRoughBeast | Purely on a pedant level, the new, improved chimps would be "pan sapiens". | |
| S Jul 21, 2015 at 19:52 | history | suggested | WhyEnBe | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
fixed grammar and sentence structure
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| Jul 21, 2015 at 19:28 | review | Suggested edits | |||
| S Jul 21, 2015 at 19:52 | |||||
| Jan 11, 2015 at 10:09 | comment | added | Anixx | Most animals gradually improve their brains, why u think it will stop improving? | |
| Dec 8, 2014 at 0:26 | comment | added | Peter M. - stands for Monica | Also, humans and bonobos evolved from common ancestors. You will need to repeat same dry situation to force bonobos out of jungle to savanna, to free hands for tools. During some bottleneck, our predecessor almost died out - it was down to some 5000 specimens in the species. It was very close. | |
| Nov 18, 2014 at 19:10 | vote | accept | Beta Decay | ||
| Nov 7, 2014 at 5:23 | comment | added | Cort Ammon | +1 For the question "What defines intelligent life." The real truth is that the rate ANYTHING appears in evolution is a mixture of how useful the adaptation is in the environment, and how lucky the organism is. How those two concepts intersect with what we call "intelligence" is a very open question with a lot of answers. | |
| Nov 1, 2014 at 18:52 | comment | added | hyde | I'm not trying to guess what OP wants, but I think it's more useful to consider what the intelligence can achieve, instead of considering what "type" it is. And I guess in this case, a good yard stick for required level of intelligence would be, "capable of purposefully building something macroscopic, which reaches Earth orbit". Then it wouldn't matter how the intelligence is distributed or achieved, yet I think it is safe to say beavers or termintes are nowhere near this level. | |
| Oct 31, 2014 at 15:26 | comment | added | Sidney | I agree that you should consider the TYPE of intelligence you're looking for. Consider beavers. They may seem like water rats, but they're actually industrious, plan ahead for the winter, and are altruistic to other species (they share their dam). They are also very social animals. Check out the PBS documentary on Netflix, "leave it to beavers" for an idea on how animals may have intelligence, but of a different type than we are used to. | |
| Oct 31, 2014 at 12:12 | comment | added | Beta Decay | I'm not asking for advice on story writing as this answer seems to be geared towards, this is just general curiosity | |
| Oct 31, 2014 at 11:47 | comment | added | Taemyr | I think your answer hinges on the assumptions chimpases are about as inteligent as the most recent common ancestor of chimpanses and humans. I think that is wrong - OTOH, 200000 years ago we had homo sapiens, and we only achieved the dominating possition in the last 20000 years so your answer is within an order of magnitude. | |
| Oct 31, 2014 at 11:16 | comment | added | Pavel Janicek | @Liath : I updated the wording a bit to let it sound better. | |
| Oct 31, 2014 at 11:15 | history | edited | Pavel Janicek | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
added 13 characters in body
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| Oct 31, 2014 at 10:55 | comment | added | Liath | I really want to upvote this answer except for the phrase "let chimps evolve to Homo Sapiens again" chips didn't evolve into humans. Humans and chimps shared a common ancestor and took different evolutionary routes... the new intelligent species in this case would "chimpus sapiens newuns" not "homo sapiens" | |
| Oct 31, 2014 at 10:50 | comment | added | user | Not rats; mice. | |
| Oct 31, 2014 at 10:34 | history | answered | Pavel Janicek | CC BY-SA 3.0 |