Quote:The angle I figure applies is that apes in general and hominids in particular are fairly well-suited to becoming the mamalian equivalent of cockroaches. 'This pointy stick I found' level tool use accounts for a lot of that, but mostly it's due to the fact that well-aged carrion is pretty much the only thing we can't eat. A proto-hominid would be able to find vegetative food when no carnivore of comparable size could ever hope to, and prey on other species when winter closed in and the grazing got even scarcer.
Making a big difference. I'm uncertain about this -- my biology classes are more than a quarter-century behind me -- but I have a feeling that any population of creatures evolved enough that it'll become human "just" two to five million years later will be seriously hurt by an extinction event -- the more complex the biological structure, the more aspects of their existence that can go wrong.
Remember that the type of extinction event we're talking about is known - several years at least of winter and winterer, so that the entire bloody planet turns into one huge arctic or tundra.
But humans can live on both of those biomes quite successfully, and I think that a proto-human would be able to manage to at least scrape by for the few decades that it would last, no matter how the rest of the food chain came crashing down around their ears.
Arrival hypothesis...
Well, first, I was speaking of the timeline in evolutionary terms; if humans and their immediately associated species aren't native, then I'd figure their having gotten there, oh, ten to twenty thousand years ago.
And, whatever it might have been, there's not even a mythic trace of their means of arrival surviving to the present day. That's just not one of the story focuses.
Ja, -n
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