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This is a subject of debate, as a few archaeologists and paleontologists believe that humans did live with dinosaurs and other scientists are opposed to that fact. During the end of the dinosaur era, there was the presence of avian dinosaurs or, in other words flying dinosaurs and birds. This type of dinosaur is rumored to have still existed when humans appeared on the earth because they were the last category of dinosaurs.
Let’s take a look at some of the myths and facts about humans and dinosaurs co-existing.
What’s the Debate about Humans and Dinosaurs Co-Existing
The problem is that some scientists, vertebrate paleontologists to be precise, have evidence that some of the birds that we have today are direct descendants of carnivorous dinosaurs. Some just believe that they are modern-living dinosaurs, which would mean that humans did live alongside dinosaurs. This can confuse people because many believe dinosaurs are huge, ferocious beasts like T-Rex or Diplodocus.
According to the facts, dinosaurs became extinct 66 million years ago. The earliest record of humans on the earth dates back to 315 000 years ago, thanks to the information given from fossil remains analysis. This would mean a gap of 65 million years between the extinction of the dinosaurs and the first humans.
Another cap to this conversation starter is that we are talking about the modern human or homo-sapiens, not our ancestors like the homo-erectus, which is believed to have lived between 1.9 million and 135,000 years ago. And before the Homo-Erectus, there was the Australopithecus, the Ramapithecus, and the Dryopithecus. So, the human species has five layers of evolution before arriving at the stage of Homosapiens or Neanderthal. This is a fact many scientists accept, but a few do not.. Such as the British naturalist Charles Darwin even wrote a book about it in 1871 entitled “The Descent of Man.”
Other theories say that an extinct species is a missing link between humans and apes.
We fall under Hominidae’s great ape family when classifying humans as living species. We are scientifically called Homosapiens and are members of the genus Homo, part of the Hominidae family. Earlier species of the genus Homo, including the Homo Habilis and Homo rudolfensis, existed two million years ago. The genus Homo was recorded 2,8 million years ago on the earth. The Hominidae is part of a family of sixteen in the Primate order. And many scientists do believe that the first primates did live with the dinosaurs.
If We Could Live With Dinosaurs
If the dinosaurs hadn’t been wiped out 66 million years ago, today’s way of living would have been very different. Let’s start by imagining how things would have been when humans appeared and had to co-exist with these majestic beasts.
First, we would want to know how to survive among them and not get eaten by an Allosaurus who had a superb sense of smell. Scientists proved this by analyzing fossilized remains’ brain cavities, meaning that some predatory dinosaurs could smell us from a mile away. It has also been proven that most dinosaurs could see very well during the night, so hunting for food at night would be a bad idea for us humans. These constraints would have led us to study dinosaurs and always be aware of their whereabouts if we were to go out looking for food.
Dinosaurs were reptiles, so they laid eggs. This would have a source of nourishment at the time, and of course, we would have to be careful not to encounter the mother whilst stealing one of these eggs. Another idea for food would have been to take down one of the herbivore dinosaurs, but two questions come to mind.
The first one would be if we could create spears sharp enough to penetrate the dinosaur’s thick skin. The second question is, if we did succeed in hunting down a dinosaur, how would we store the meat because one dinosaur is equal to the massive size of the meat? Would we be able to finish it off in time before it started to rot and attract dangerous scavengers?
Looking for food in the sea could have provided some fish and snails, but once again, we would have to be careful as the waters had some dangerous predators like the Mosasaurs and Ichthyosaurus.
Scavenging for fruits in the Jurassic period might have also been a problem. There was the choice of some seaweeds and fungi, but some of these plants were poisonous, and pine seeds of certain conifers would have been a safe snack. The ginkgo was a primitive fruit because of its center, but the skin smelled of excrements.
Final Thoughts
I don’t know about other people’s perceptions of these facts and myths, but I believe there is a good reason that dinosaurs died out, and we humans came to conquer the earth. And when you think about we are kind of living with dinosaurs because the planet earth englobes more than 10 400 “modern” dinosaurs such as the crocodile, the ostrich, the emu, and many more.
