What Species Would Become Dominant on Earth If Humans Died Out?
By Luc Bussiere
/ theconversation.com
In a post-apocalyptic future, what might happen to life if humans
left the scene? After all, humans are very likely to disappear long
before the sun expands into a red giant and exterminates all living things from the Earth.
Assuming that we don’t extinguish all other life as we disappear (an unlikely feat in spite of our unique propensity for driving extinction), history tells us to expect some pretty fundamental changes when humans are no longer the planet’s dominant animal species.
So if we were given the chance to peek forward in time at the Earth
some 50m years after our disappearance, what would we find? Which animal
or group of animals would “take over” as the dominant species? Would we
have a Planet of the Apes, as imagined in popular fiction? Or would the
Earth come to be dominated by dolphins, or rats, or water bears, or cockroaches or pigs, or ants?
The question has inspired a lot of popular speculation and many
writers have offered lists of candidate species. Before offering any
guesses, however, we need to carefully explain what we mean by a
dominant species.
