Alternate Evolution

150,000 years the human race was almost wiped out due to massive droughts in Africa. Estimates were that fewer than 2000 modern humans remained @ that time and every one on the planet can trace their roots back to an single individual 200,000 years ago. In 150,000 years the earths current races came from a single source "a cosmic blink of the eye".

I propose the following scenario:

7 Million years ago on the plains of Africa a small group of Hominids looked nervously @ the sky. It was literally rippling with auroras caused by an Supernova that exploded 125,000 light years away. The resulting Gamma burst was a near miss in cosmic terms but powerful enough to strip off 10-17% of the Ozone layer.

Eco systems crashed and the opportunistic hominids were left to fill the gaps of 75% of existing life forms. Humans still evolve but in a very different world where Humanities earliest ancestors have filled the Gaps from predator to prey.

Thoughts.

 
Hmmm.... Interesting. There are only a few such ATLs.
But I think that might slow human technological development, in the sense that we would just use stones and sticks, not even inventing weapons, as most of humanity will either be just predators or prey animals.
 
Interesting scenario

A couple of things to consider though. Firstly what you describe would be the 6th major mass extinction event. In general what survives mass extinctions are small generalist species, still it comes down to luck so let us suppose that the species ancestral to OTL Homo Sapiens Sapiens survives the catastrophe

There are going to be major butterflies in this TL. Let us assume that the word human is being used in a cladistic fashion to mean all species more closely related to OTL Homo Sapiens Sapiens than to OTL Pan Troglodytes

Now first off, I'm not sure whether or not you picked the number out of the air, but this is around the time that the human and chimpanzee lineages split. In all probability the chimpanzee lineage will be wiped out (as would the human lineage but the OP states that the human lineage survive)

In the years after the mass extinction finding food is going to be tough to say the least. Living organisms are going to be quite rare. Even the 25% of species that survived the extinction are going to have been whittled down to a small percentage of their pre extinction numbers. Have you read Dies the Fire? Think of that level of die off happening to virtually every surviving species.

Food being scarce means energy is scarce. Now big intelligent brains are very energy intensive. There will be an intense selective pressure for smaller, more energy efficient brains. Conversely there will also be pressure for greater intelligence to aid in the gathering of food. Now you hypothesise ATL humans diversifying into multiple niches. Each human species therefore will likely find their own balance to these 2 competing pressures

So after a few centuries to millennia the world will start to recover. This recovery will still be on going 7 million years after the mass extinction. It is likely that there will be relatively few genera with each having a relatively large number of recently diverged and very similar species in them.

By the time you get to the present day equivalent don't expect to find any species that corresponds to OTL Homo Sapiens Sapiens. However you may well find a lot of species that are hauntingly familiar to a few of those you'd be familiar with in OTL should you find your way across to this time-line
 
Eco systems crashed and the opportunistic hominids were left to fill the gaps of 75% of existing life forms.

You almost certainly mean "75% of existing vertebrates." Wiping out 75% of species of plants, invertibrates, fungi, and single-celled organisms would surpass P-Tr as the worst extinction in Earth history. And forcing hominids to replace the ecological niches of plants, invertibrates, fungi, and single-celled organisms would be ... tricky.
 
Interesting indeed.

One bit that is going to dramatically alter the outcome is the timing. Seven mya you don't have real hominids yet - even the australopithicenes are well down the road. That makes it more surprising that our ancestors would survive because they hadn't yet developed the mental/social/technological flexibility that allowed them to dominate this past million years or so.

Assuming it does happen then, and they do survive, they are going to be able to spread into a wide variety of ecological niches. Their inevitable die-back in the event, combined with the very specific selective pressures of each "role" they are taking on, mean that by the present day:

Average animal size world-wide is noticeably less, with mega-fauna (equivalents to elephants, moose, whales, bears, etc.) of all sorts being "replaced" after total extinction in the die-off. Fair intelligence, flexibility, and the fact that they survived at all will place great apes throughout Africa, southernmost Europe, and most of Asia. Intelligence seems to some degree to be a self-feeding evolutionary cycle, so expect several kinds to be much more intelligent and sophisticated than the chimpanzees. Fire may be in use.

Speaking as a former biology student, I'd love to delve into the resulting ecosystems. Speaking as a former history student.... not so much. No way are you even getting to the Neolithic by the present day.

From the latter perspective, it'd be both more plausible and more interesting to have the extinction event a mere million years ago. By then some of the proto-hominids were probably flexible enough to have a real advantage, and smart enough that civilizations could conceivably arise by the present day. Also, you don't have to reverse-engineer as much of the non-primate fauna, because it was roughly similar to today, but with bigger critters.
 
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