2008: A World without Homo

How many tyrannosaurus fossils do we have? About 5. Yes 5...

What does that tell you?
On the contrary, if you check your sources, Professor, we actually have 30+ confirmed rex specimens all over the world. Hell, Barnum Brown himself found 5 specimens alone, and those were all done during the turn of the 20th century.
 
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Your people don't know yet apparently, but we squid are the heirs of the universe. - It took us some time to conquer land, but we made it. We beat the extinct genus homo in terms of intelligence by 3:1, our technology is (althoug we require Bonobo slaves to operate it) far superior. Octopi sail near Alpha Centauri, let's go for Andromeda!
 
Wow. I've seen the intelligent-raccoon crowd take over threads before, but this one really takes the cake.

You're absolutely right of course, the lack of our genus isn't magically going to make sea otter civilizations. That's not how evolution works. By far the closest critters to sentience are still the australopithicenes. If anyone is going to build civilizations a few million years down the road it's them. But, again, that's not really the point, eh?

Moving on. Without full sentience and within-a-lifetime tool invention, the australopiths aren't going to have near the same impact that we did. Still, big brains, bipedal legs, and hands are all powerful advantages. We could expect the hominids to continue steadily expanding out of Africa - first into the Middle East and Southern Europe, then quickly along the Indian Ocean basin, and gradually north into Europe proper, the Caucasus, and (probably) central and eastern Asia.

Unlike Homo, which tended to quickly become a keystone species and then kill off its local relatives (how Europe and the Middle East became Neanderthal habitat and southern Asia went Erectus before Sapiens swamped them both) the Australopiths will alter ecosystems without becoming the center of them. Social hominids are decent competitors for tight resources, and given 2.5 million years it's likely that fire use (not necessarily making) will be added to their repertoire. Species in direct competition - bears, other primates, some canines and pigs - will be gradually outcompeted. In dry regions you'd see a decline in megafauna that could be spooked away from watering holes. Meanwhile the average size of the big critters will decline across the board. Still, this is all less than in OTL.

Without hitting the sapient wall (as we did ~100,000 years ago) it's unlikely that you'll get hominid "monocultures." By which I mean that any relatively diverse ecosystem is likely to end up sporting 2-3 different species of intelligent, bipedal primates. Speciation will be along diet lines - big-jawed herbivores, long-fingered fishers and trappers, small-game hunters with long running legs, smaller-bodied scavengers (Homo may have started off here, OTL), etc. In cold regions, epicanthic folds and wide cheekbones will replace prominent noses and facial hair. In very dry ones you'll get species with big fatty deposits on the rump for storing water (the San were already heading this direction in OTL after only a couple hundred thousand years in the Kalahari; leave hominids there for a million years....). In fringe environments in the Congo Basin you'll get a short-limbed, vaguely pygmy-looking variety that will compete with Chimps, but only gradually make inroads into their habitat.

Australia and Siberia may avoid hominid colonization entirely, and the Americas certainly will. That means a lot more megafauna outside of Australia, where the drying trend was the biggest factor. Even there I'd expect another size level up in the herbivores and the survival of a smaller variant of the marsupial "big cats."

If intelligence does eventually arrive, half a million or so years down the road, it will be rather depressing how many species get swamped by the winners. They're also going to have a rough time getting civilized. Most of the species in Europe and Asia will have had as much as a million years of evolving side-by-side with early hominids. Just like the African wildlife of OTL. That means the mammals are going to be nigh-on impossible to domesticate. The ones that we tamed in OTL will mostly be on the slow die-out circa 2008 TTL, because the same factors that make them easy to catch and tame make them easy to catch and eat.
 

Hnau

Banned
Intelligent analysis, Admiral Matt. Domesticated animals would certainly die out in this universe by the time sentience evolves. Hmm... I guess that leaves for the sentient-austropiths an interesting choice: other hominids. Especially if the austropiths have speciated so much, I wonder if the sentients will domesticate them to work in their areas of speciality. They won't be used for hard labor or transportation as in OTL, but they could be used as hunting companions, if anything. Strange idea, but I doubt it would actually come about...
 
Intelligent analysis, Admiral Matt. Domesticated animals would certainly die out in this universe by the time sentience evolves. Hmm... I guess that leaves for the sentient-austropiths an interesting choice: other hominids. Especially if the austropiths have speciated so much, I wonder if the sentients will domesticate them to work in their areas of speciality. They won't be used for hard labor or transportation as in OTL, but they could be used as hunting companions, if anything. Strange idea, but I doubt it would actually come about...
Actually, they might even be used for hard labor and transportation (well, depending on your definition of both). If a particularly small species is the one to become sentient, and there are larger species around, they could probably be useful for riding (piggy-back). Of course, this isn't as useful as a horse, but if the larger species can go twice as fast as you on foot, that's still quite helpful. As far as other labor, again a larger species could be used to perform more heavy-duty tasks that the sentient species can't do, and is far more trainable to do different tasks than any domesticate we ever had.
And as far as animals in Admiral Matt's analysis being nearly impossible to domesticate, this may be true in Eurasia/Africa, but when sentient species reach the Americas, they may find quite a few species who have no prior interaction with hominids, and therefore it may be the Western Hemisphere where you have opportunities for large domesticated animals. This would be quite an interesting contrast to OTL, and could lead to a reversal of fortunes for the peoples of both hemispheres.

I realize this has again gotten us off topic, so let's get back to the world without homo circa 2008, without any sentient species at all, judging the worth of our species by comparing it with a world without us.
In what ways could we imagine this world to be superior to ours?
Well, I for one imagine the ecosystems of this world to be more diverse, and of course, I imagine the climate of this world to not currently be in any danger of a warming trend caused by burning coal, wood and oil.
Sounds like two wins for no humanity at first, but on the other hand, only time will tell whether we are able to correct what we've been doing to the climate, and it isn't hard to imagine in the future we might even have more species due to advances in genetics (or maybe we just breed replacement species for the ones we've caused to die off). Not only that, but we may one day have the ability to intervene in global disasters and save not only ourselves but other species as well from extinction. Then again, perhaps extinction plays an important role in evolution, and by stifling extinctions we may be interfering and preventing our own evolution. Or, we may have reached the point where we can evolve on our own...
 
Interesting what if; I'm glad it's not lost in the Harry Potter. Thank you boredatwork!

My own take is that if australopithicenes left home country, they'd find themselves in ecological competitition with pigs, who are very good at their job. 'Man the Hunter' always seems to be directly competing with wolves. The australopithicenes might have human-style tools and fire, and I suspect they did our number one weapon, which is that we smell and taste horrible - 'strictly emergency rations'. It would be a close call either way, we might end up with Wolfworld lite (less intelligence on each side)

Always one for the obvious, I also mention that much of the strangeness of Australia's flora seems to be from Aborigines' consistent long term use of fire. TTL Australia would be more Indonesian (New Zealand on the south coast)
 
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