# Question



## Rawled Demha (May 26, 2007)

hey peeps, wonderin if anyone can help me...

did dinosaurs co-exist with any non-ape descendants of man? all i kno about our predecessors is that we had neanderthals and Cro-Magnons (or something else similar by name) and the CM were too hot for the neans to handle. 

i have been told that it is not so, but have also been offered no proof... i know for a "fact" that there were mammals around at that time but what of man?

is there any reasonable line of arguments that say it is not possible for "men" to have existed during the time of dinosaurs?


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## HardScienceFan (May 26, 2007)

Oh deary me.........
Ben
Also new to Western civilization


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## The Ace (May 26, 2007)

Well, if you accept that the mass extinction which obliterated around 70% of all living species (the dinosaurs were merely the most spectacular) occurred some 65 million years ago and hominid fossils only go back about 2 million years, I've always found the answer to be self-evident.
  Primitive, shrew-like mammals can be traced back to the Triassic Period but with only limited ecological niches open to them, mammals didn't get the evolutionary break they needed until the dinosaurs were gone.  Even in the Upper Cretaceous, the largest mammals were opportunistic scavengers about the size of a modern house-cat.
   So, in brief, although there were ancestral mammals contemporary with the dinosaurs, there was nothing remotely ape-like, far less human, at that time.

Err HSF, when Ghandi was asked what he thought of Western Civilisation, his reply was, "Yes, it would be a good idea. "  A viewpoint not without merit.


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## HardScienceFan (May 26, 2007)

The Ace said:


> Even in the Upper Cretaceous, the largest mammals were opportunistic scavengers about the size of a modern house-cat.
> So, in brief, although there were ancestral mammals contemporary with the dinosaurs, there was nothing remotely ape-like, far less human, at that time.


Evenin,Ace.
Been watching TROY with Pitt and all,but HECK....
The housecat thing,you sure about that?I will look it up,but there was a recent discovery of a somewhat larger mammal,with,get it......dinosaur remains in the putative stomach area.
Ben


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## The Ace (May 26, 2007)

Well, I did say they were scavengers.  That would be an interesting point, though, could you post the link if you find it please?  I'm a little rusty these days.


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## HardScienceFan (May 27, 2007)

*Yay,found it
Large Mesozoic mammals fed on young dinosaurs *
Yaoming Hu, Jin Meng, Yuanqing Wang, Chuankui Li
*SUMMARY:* Mesozoic mammals are commonly portrayed as shrew- or rat-sized animals that were mainly insectivorous, probably nocturnal and lived in the shadow of dinosaurs. The largest known Mesozoic mammal 
*CONTEXT:* ...in the shadow of dinosaurs. The largest known Mesozoic *mammal* represented by substantially complete remains is Repenomamusrobustus, a triconodont *mammal* from the Lower *Cretaceous* of Liaoning, China. An adult individual of R. robustus... 
Nature 433, 149 - 152 (13 Jan 2005) Letter 
Abstract | Full Text | PDF | Rights and permissions | Save this link


USD 30 for this article,phooeey
Here you go Ace
Ben


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## j d worthington (May 27, 2007)

Rawled Demha said:


> hey peeps, wonderin if anyone can help me...
> 
> did dinosaurs co-exist with any non-ape descendants of man? all i kno about our predecessors is that we had neanderthals and Cro-Magnons (or something else similar by name) and the CM were too hot for the neans to handle.
> 
> ...


 
To answer your questions a bit further: There weren't all that many mammals around at that point, and certainly no evidence of primates. The evidence is mounting up (though still not quite certain) that it was climatological changes that actually drove the Neanderthalers into extinction... though competition with Cro-Magnon is still held by many to be a considerable factor.

And, frankly, the likelihood of human beings evolving in such an environment is tenuous, at best. Too large for quick and easy hiding, too weak to compete with the sorts of predators around at that point, and certainly unable to develop weapons to pierce the larger predators' hides, for one thing. And, as has been noted, the evidence for such mass extinctions is pretty strong... but there's no evidence of any sort of anthropoid fossils anywhere near the level we'd find dinosaurs....


The way I've seen it given as a simple demonstration (this is from a bit by Richard Dawkins): If you hold your arm out from the shoulder, and you start at the knot in your tie (assuming you're wearing one), then the dinosaurs are somewhere close to the wrist; all recorded human history would be the dust from a single scraping of a nail file. Human existence (including the earliest actual humans) would still be somewhere at the tip of the nail.....

This will also give you a rough idea of the sorts of timelines we're talking about:

Timeline of human evolution - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

There's also a graph showing geologic time scales covering up through the present era:

Geologic time scale - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

As you can see, human beings are in the very smallest portion of that scale....


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## The Ace (May 27, 2007)

Gotcha HSF, there isn't a lot of difference between an opossum and a cat, the cat may be a shade bigger.  Our friend is still a mucked-about shrew, though.


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## HardScienceFan (May 27, 2007)

I) you got access to NATURE????or did you read the abstrac????
2) *Acta Paleontologica Polonica* has heaps of articles on Mesozoic mammals,some cracking stuff in there.Lot of taxonomy,though.Check out Jorn Hurum's articles on multituberculates,if so inclined .
.: Acta Palaeontologica Polonica :. Home Page


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## The Ace (May 27, 2007)

Googled the name, easy once I'd split it,_ Robustus _is the specific name.


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## Rawled Demha (May 27, 2007)

cheers guys, jus 1 further q...so in the realm of sf, it would not be implausible to have them coexist?


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## Delvo (May 27, 2007)

There's just no way it could even be close at all without time travel.


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## littlemissattitude (May 27, 2007)

Delvo said:


> There's just no way it could even be close at all without time travel.



Science fiction - no unless, as Delvo said, it involves time travel.

Fantasy - sure; anything goes there, so long as it is internally consistent.

But, you know, unless I'm misunderstanding the original question, I think Ralwed mean non-ape _ancestors_ of man, not _descendants_.

And, I'm not really sure how you are defining "non-ape".  Bipedal?  In that case, you can go back, perhaps 4.4 million years to _Ardipithecus ramidus_,which is known mostly from cranial remains (above the neck), but seems to have had a foramen magnum - that's the hole through which the spinal cord attaches to the brain - that had the skull sitting on top of the spinal column, which implies some sort of bipedalism although possibly not of the modern sort.  But 4.4 million years ago is still long, long after the extiction of the dinosaurs.

For more information on _ramidus_, the Australopithecines, and our own genus _Homo_, you might want to check out Archaeology Info.


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## HardScienceFan (May 27, 2007)

i am just reading the new _Lethaia_,about a new discovery in Jehol,China.
The title:'Taphonomy of hominid remains in the putative gut of _Allosaurus_"
It seems the skeleton *a humerus,a scapula,some molars,and metatarsals* was found among the ribs of the _A_.specimen,get this,*holding a cellphone,a partially digested credit card,and the keys to an expensive Volvo*,*plus some partially legible divorce papers*!
K/Ar dating and palynological dating do not agree however,and there are problems with correlating the lacustrine with marine sequences.

Ben,*not* an anagram


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## chrispenycate (May 27, 2007)

Science fiction _can_ do it without time travel; "West of Eden", Harry Harrison, postulates an asteroid miss; and Conan Doyle's Professor Challenger (and his multiple copyists) postulating somewhere on the planet where, for some reason, an entire prehistoric ecology survived.


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## Rawled Demha (Jun 6, 2007)

chrispenycate said:


> Science fiction _can_ do it without time travel; "West of Eden", Harry Harrison, postulates an asteroid miss; and Conan Doyle's Professor Challenger (and his multiple copyists) postulating somewhere on the planet where, for some reason, an entire prehistoric ecology survived.


 
where? where?! in the name of science aqnd all that is good, WHERE?>!?!?


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## chrispenycate (Jun 6, 2007)

According to Conan Doyle, on a volcanic plateau above the amazon basin. Or did you mean which book? It's "The lost world"


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## Rawled Demha (Jun 11, 2007)

thank you.

conan doyle eh?

The lost world eh?

Thank you indeed.


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## Snowdog (Jun 11, 2007)

So we're not putting much creedence in the hollow earth theory then? (ERB's Pellucidar)


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