this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2026
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What made evolution accelerate that dinosaur evolution took so long, but turning little mammals into humans was fast?
Mass extinctions promote rapid expansion and diversification of surviving species into newly available niches.
There's also a Hypothesis iirc that this rapid expansion also lowered our life span. Longevity Bottleneck Hypothesis though I think this one includes dinosaurs hunting mammals, and maybe Disposable Soma Theory.
Huh, the second one could probably be used to explain elves in fantasy: long life, low reproduction rate.
imagine the roach empires that will rise once we do ourselves in
A large meteorite
From the last dinosaurs to the first humans was 66 million years, it wasn't that fast.
What is weird is that humans are so intelligent. It's much easier to evolve big teeth and ripping claws to make you the dominant species then it is to evolve a highly complex brain.
It can't have been the extinction of the dinosaurs that had that impetus because by the time the first proto humans were around any effects of the asteroid impact would have long since dissipated. So there must have been some other threat that arose that was dangerous enough to require us to evolve to survive it, but was slow burning enough that it gave time for that evolution to happen. It also left no evidence.
It's because Ancient Aliens came and gave us knowledge to speed up the growth of our early civilizations.
I think theres growing consensus that tool use itself led to us becoming more intelligent, basically the group of great apes that humans and chimps came from that led to humans started to use tools at increasing rates which caused a feedback loop. Tools allow better resource exploitation while conserving energy and gaining more energy this basically caused evolution to throw everything into the dump stat that is intelligence which further worsened the feedback loop.
Ditching our thagomizers for the ability to craft giant iron flails.
Min-maxing to ruin the game for everyone.