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Would humans exist if dinosaurs were still alive?

66 million years ago, a huge asteroid hit the earth, bringing the age of dinosaurs to an end. But what if those dinosaurs hadn’t died out? Would humans have ever evolved?

66 million years ago, a huge asteroid hit the earth, wiping out most of the dinosaurs that roamed the land. It would still be tens of millions of years before the first humans appeared - but what if those dinosaurs hadn’t died out? Would we ever have evolved?

CrowdScience listener Sunil was struck by this thought as he passed a Jurassic fossil site: if dinosaurs were still around, would I be here now?
We dive back into the past to see how our distant mammal ancestors managed to live alongside huge, fierce dinosaurs; and why the disappearance of those dinosaurs was great news for mammals. They invaded the spaces left behind, biodiversity flourished, and that led – eventually – to humans evolving. It looks like our existence depends on that big dinosaur extinction.

But we explore a big ‘what if?’: if the asteroid hadn’t hit, could our primate ancestors still have found a niche – somewhere, somehow - to evolve into humans? Or would evolution have taken a radically different path: would dinosaurs have developed human levels of intelligence? Is highly intelligent life inevitable, if you give it long enough to develop? We look to modern day birds - descendants of certain small dinosaurs who survived the asteroid strike - to glean some clues.

With artist Memo Kosemen, palaeontologists Elsa Panciroli and Darren Naish, palaeobiologist Anjali Goswami, and Professor of Comparative Cognition Nicola Clayton

Presented by Marnie Chesterton and Anand Jagatia
Produced by Cathy Edwards for the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ World Service

(Photo: Silhouette of people and Dino. Credit: Getty Images)

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35 minutes

Last on

Mon 9 Dec 2019 18:32GMT

Broadcasts

  • Fri 6 Dec 2019 20:32GMT
  • Fri 6 Dec 2019 21:32GMT
  • Sun 8 Dec 2019 00:32GMT
  • Mon 9 Dec 2019 05:32GMT
  • Mon 9 Dec 2019 06:32GMT
  • Mon 9 Dec 2019 07:32GMT
  • Mon 9 Dec 2019 11:32GMT
  • Mon 9 Dec 2019 14:32GMT
  • Mon 9 Dec 2019 18:32GMT

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