Could early man have competed with the dinosaurs?

Megafauna were usually herbivores.

@ OP

I'd have to say yes. They survived saber tooths and Wolly Mamoths. Dinos evolved to fight and eat dinos, tiny mamls on two legs with tool would be tough for them to adjust too.

We could have survived the dinosaurs, at least until they developed the greatest threat to mankind: T-rexes in F-14 Tomcats.

That's one of the best panels of a comic book ever.

Correct me if I'm wrong but the scenario seems to be about humans suddenly appearing and then competing with the dinos so I have a question: is it even possible for humans to evolve side by side with the dinos? I think having a population advantage is important here. I mean even if early humans appeared at the height of the dinos' reign, wouldn't they have a population disadvantage and thus, even with knowledge and tools, they would not be able to compete?

I think this is mostly a "what happens" question then a "How it happend". I don't think it could though, unless God had a really strange sense of humor. The only Mammals evolved yet were little Mouse-like things.

He might…

Actually, mammals were far more diverse in the Mesozoic than people give them credit for. For instance, Repenomamus was a wolverine like predator, and there is now an undescribed mammal that was more or less twice as big.

Meanwhile, Volaticotherium was gliding around and now many people have atributed several mammalian teeth from the late Cretaceous as being it's descendents, implying that mammals were already flying in the age of the dinosaurs, while Castorocauda and stagodonts were aquatic.

You see, this is the problem with schools! they don't teach us the really cool stuff about the dinosaur age!

Could early man have competed with the dinosaurs?

I doubt it. Even Ice Age megafauna would have been small potatoes compared with, say, the tyrannosaurs, ceratopsians, ankylosaurs and hadrosaurs of the Late Cretaceous. The biggest carnivore ancient humans would have faced would have been a giant bear, which was probably mostly omnivorous and hunted alone, or a sabre-toothed cat slightly bigger than a Siberian tiger. Even a medium-sized tyrannosaur like Daspletosaurus would have been a full-blooded pack hunter and nearly the size of a mammoth. They would have massacred a tribal village in no time.

About the only place humanity would have had an advantage would have been if they could have found an area populated by smaller dinosaurs, like hypsilophodonts and dromaeosaurids. There, they might have been able to outwit their contemporaries without needing to compete with overpowered hunters. Humans may also have had advantages by being omnivorous, immune to certain dinosaur diseases, and able to hide and set up homes out of reach of predators.

Reaching civilisation, however, would have been near impossible - any crops planted would have been destroyed by herds of giant herbivores, and good luck farming anything that wasn't as highly social as a dog, a horse, a cow, or a sheep (in the Cretaceous, pretty much everything). Besides, humanity nearly became extinct a few times in its history, possibly going through a genetic bottleneck about 70,000 years ago, possibly at the same time there was a volcanic eruption in the Indonesian peninsula (Toba catastrophe theory). Given how volcanic the Late Cretaceous was, I doubt humanity would have lasted long there.

If humans lived alongside dinosaurs I think we simply wouldn't set up villages in places where we were liable to be preyed upon by roaming predators. We'd pick places which were harder to find and easier to defend.

We may not be able to match the mightiest tyrannosaurs in terms of physical prowess, but history has shown that man is pretty much capable of outsmarting anything.

Mankind completly and utterly destroyed Quinkana, a terrestrial crocodile every bit as fearsome as a tyrannosaur, as well as the giant ground sloths, which were armoured by subcutaneous osteoderms.

No matter how well protected, dinosaurs would be dead.

Maybe we'd tame them like we did wolves. /Dreams of having a pet raptor to sick on a-holes/ That'd be awsome!

If humans lived alongside dinosaurs I think we simply wouldn't set up villages in places where we were liable to be preyed upon by roaming predators. We'd pick places which were harder to find and easier to defend.

Once we found such a place, it would work in our favour, but we'd have to get there first, and that leaves a lot of risk of predation. It would be bad news if we ended up having to move, though.

We may not be able to match the mightiest tyrannosaurs in terms of physical prowess, but history has shown that man is pretty much capable of outsmarting anything.

Being smarter than your opponent isn't always an advantage. For one thing, bigger brains need better food, ideally meat, in which all the nutrients are concentrated. That means we would have competed with other meat eaters, and even in our normal history we were nearly outgunned by more specialised predators like lions, wolves, hyenas and jackals. Goodness knows how we would have fared against the likes of Tarbosaurus, Carcharodontosaurus, Mapusaurus and Tyrannosaurus.

Another problem is that knowledge does not guarantee success. We have tracking devices and better optical equipment these days, and yet less technologically gifted hunters like African leopards and snow leopards can still routinely give us the slip. We can work in teams to mob other rivals, and still succumb to panic when faced with an expert ambush hunter like a tiger. We have guns and can still get creamed by one enraged elephant. And as far as ecological niches are concerned, humans didn't live in an environment in which predators were routinely larger than buses, pack hunters, and commonly capable of crushing through bone (tyrannosaurs).

Mankind completly and utterly destroyed Quinkana, a terrestrial crocodile every bit as fearsome as a tyrannosaur, as well as the giant ground sloths, which were armoured by subcutaneous osteoderms.

Quite apart from the supposition that Quinkana was "every bit as fearsome as a tyrannosaur", the jury's still out on the humans-wiped-them-out theory. It could just as easily have been that a warming of the world's climate after the last Ice Age destroyed the ecosystems these creatures inhabited, and when food chains are upset the largest animals tend to be the first to go. They simply cannot obtain enough food.

I know the only way to test it would be to create dinosaur-land and put in some humans and see how they fared, but given how unlike our ancestral environment the world of dinosaurs must have been, and that mammals rarely got much bigger than the smallest dinosaurs back then (there must be a reason for that), I don't think we'd do very well unless civilisation was already established.

At this point, it is generally considered obvious that mankind wiped out the Pleistocene beasties. I mean, seriously, how else would you explain these animals surviving thousands of glaciary and interglaciary periods and only disappearing when mankind arrived?

The pattern of megafaunal extinctions perfectly coincides with competition and predation from humans. Nearly 60% of Africa's megafauna disappeared as hominids became more diverse, including over ten species of elephants, at least three species of giant tortoises, all of the three saber toothed cat genera and several Panthera species, all of the chalicotheres and sivatheres, three canines, two hyenas, at least two ostrich species and five hippopotami. These extinctions could had been blamed on climatic changes, but the problem is that all of these animals still lived in Asia until humans arrived there.

In fact, climate changes might had been caused by us; many aboriginal people set fires in order to renew vegetation. In Australia, this resulted in ony the hard desert plants surviving; in fact, with the extinction of plants less adapted to fires, evapotranspiration rates decreased, and the australian climate became drier.

At this point, it is generally considered obvious that mankind wiped out the Pleistocene beasties. I mean, seriously, how else would you explain these animals surviving thousands of glaciary and interglaciary periods and only disappearing when mankind arrived?

Likely, not obvious. But in that case, humans and many megafaunal species were in contact for tens of thousands of years before the latter finally became extinct, and certainly there is evidence that we hunted them in the meantime and that the arrival of humans anywhere that wasn't Africa (our home continent) tended to precede massive population drops in the Americas, Asia and Australia. But how exactly did we wipe them out? And wouldn't our arrival itself need some sort of cause or causes? Why isn't that a direct cause of megafaunal extincion?

Suppose, for instance, that humans only spread into new environments in the first place because the climate changed, or in pursuit of some prized plant source that was spreading widely. The humans move in after this resource. It does not favour those of the local giant herbivores, so they go extinct. Humans also happen to have hunted some of them. The palaeontological record does not rule out the possibility that the arrival of humans and the extinction of large animals were both caused by a third factor. There's also the question of why humans would hunt so intensively when modern tribes show that humans in the wild tend to be very conservative with their hunting.

The pattern of megafaunal extinctions perfectly coincides with competition and predation from humans. Nearly 60% of Africa's megafauna disappeared as hominids became more diverse, including over ten species of elephants, at least three species of giant tortoises, all of the three saber toothed cat genera and several Panthera species, all of the chalicotheres and sivatheres, three canines, two hyenas, at least two ostrich species and five hippopotami.

Where'd you get that list? Humans lived on Africa long enough for both sides to adapt to each other. Indeed, Africa is noted as the one place where megafaunal extinctions didn't happen soon after human occupation.

In fact, climate changes might had been caused by us; many aboriginal people set fires in order to renew vegetation. In Australia, this resulted in ony the hard desert plants surviving; in fact, with the extinction of plants less adapted to fires, evapotranspiration rates decreased, and the australian climate became drier.

Now that's simply exaggeration. It's taking tons and tons of fossil fuel consumption by hundreds of millions of people just to get the subtle effects we have today. Bush burning by a few wayward tribes is not likely to be anywhere near as dramatic on the climate, even with tens of thousands of years.

And this still doesn't address the point that dinosaurs were a whole different game from large mammals, and even from terror birds and ostriches. We simply don't have a modern parallel for the likes of Tyrannosaurus or Giganotosaurus, and they regularly hunted creatures bigger than lorries, creatures with horns the size of broomhandles, creatures with armour-plated bodies and bone-crushing clubs for tails, and creatures that could stomp a mammoth underfoot. Mammoths, woolly rhinos, glyptodonts and giant ground sloths would have been dwarfs next to some of these creatures.

> And this still doesn't address the point that dinosaurs were a whole different game from large mammals, and even from terror birds and ostriches. We simply don't have a modern parallel for the likes of Tyrannosaurus or Giganotosaurus, and they regularly hunted creatures bigger than lorries, creatures with horns the size of broomhandles, creatures with armour-plated bodies and bone-crushing clubs for tails, and creatures that could stomp a mammoth underfoot. Mammoths, woolly rhinos, glyptodonts and giant ground sloths would have been dwarfs next to some of these creatures.

Being super-predator have a price too. Tiger will need hunting zone far larger than wolf. Sabretooth need larger area to hunt than coyote. The more powerful predator, the more rare they are. Wolves is a threat in Europe until 17th century while lion extinct in Greece on Roman times. Also supre-predator have to born small, and spend years growing up when they vulnerable.

> Another problem is that knowledge does not guarantee success.

There are no need to have guaranteed succees. As long more of your children survive to adulthood than children of Tyrannosaurus or lion. Slowly (centuries time) you will be victorious. Survival is not contest between individual, but generation-long contest between society and species.

Where'd you get that list? Humans lived on Africa long enough for both sides to adapt to each other. Indeed, Africa is noted as the one place where megafaunal extinctions didn't happen soon after human occupation.

Research on Pliocene and Pleistocene megafauna; for a less time wasting method than mine, you can either read Tetrapod Zoology comment sections or go to "Ask a Biologist". Africa is noted as retaining a larger number of living megafauna than other continents, but still there were many, many extinctions, all coinciding with hominid diversification. I mean, casual observation can tell you this; african Homotherium species were gone long before asian and american species, for instance.

For a more concrete list, see:

http://www.megafauna.com/chapter12.htm

Now that's simply exaggeration. It's taking tons and tons of fossil fuel consumption by hundreds of millions of people just to get the subtle effects we have today. Bush burning by a few wayward tribes is not likely to be anywhere near as dramatic on the climate, even with tens of thousands of years.

Not really. All it took for the formation of the Sahara was overgrazing by goats, something that occured much more rapidly than the australian wildfire thingie. Furthermore, both North Africa and Australia have passed through many periods with temperatures identical to the Holocene's, yet they've never been drier before our arrival.

And this still doesn't address the point that dinosaurs were a whole different game from large mammals, and even from terror birds and ostriches. We simply don't have a modern parallel for the likes of Tyrannosaurus or Giganotosaurus, and they regularly hunted creatures bigger than lorries, creatures with horns the size of broomhandles, creatures with armour-plated bodies and bone-crushing clubs for tails, and creatures that could stomp a mammoth underfoot. Mammoths, woolly rhinos, glyptodonts and giant ground sloths would have been dwarfs next to some of these creatures.

The idea that dinosaurs were that different is in itself ridiculous. We have the idea that most dinosaurs were gigantic monstruousities, but aside from some sauropods and a fewother large herbivores (as well as more or less three theropod species), they were within the range of sizes exhibited by modern mammals; in fact, indricotheres competed with size with most large herbivorous dinosaurs, being surpassed only by the largest sauropods.

Diprotodonts, rhinos and toxodonts are rough analogues for ceratopsian dinosaur dinosaurs, the only difference is either in the lack of horns or of parrot like jaws (and toxodonts and diprotodonts had equally nasty jaws), glyptodonts and meiolanid turtles were perfectly analogous to modern ankylosaurs, and giant ground sloths basically mixed ankylosaur and therizinosaur features, making them far more well armoured than any dinosaur. Yet they all fell. All it takes is the herbivores to die for the carnivores to die as well.

edited 29th Oct '11 4:18:36 AM by Gannetwhale

OK. I don't have an answer to that. It's a good argument. You win the debate. Consider me convinced.

edited 1st Nov '11 3:00:48 PM by BlueChameleon