rise of the planet of the apes release date

When non-avian dinosaurs went extinct 66 million years ago, mammals rose to fill many of their vacant niches. To add context to this scenario, the common ancestor of modern humans and chimpanzees lived about 7 million years ago, Live Science previously reported.īut any disaster potent enough to wipe out humans is also likely to wipe out chimps, which leaves another tool-using candidate to fill humans’ niche: birds. That said, it would probably take hundreds of thousands or even millions of years of evolution for other apes to develop the ability to create and use sophisticated, human-like tools. It's possible that if humans go extinct, these hominids might replace us hominins, à la 'Planet of the Apes.' There is precedent for that kind of overlap - after all, our species managed to outlast the intelligent Neanderthals during the most recent ice age 40,000 years ago, according to a 2021 study published in the journal Nature. Other primates, like chimpanzees ( Pan troglodytes) and bonobos ( Pan paniscus), our closest living relatives, already have opposable thumbs that they use to make tools in the wild. In other words, they would need opposable thumbs - or at least thumb equivalents. In order to fill the same ecological role as humans - that is, building cities and heavily modifying our environment - another species would need to develop a similar capacity to manipulate objects. One feature that makes humans uniquely good at building and spatial reasoning is our dexterous hands, according to research from the University of Manchester. However, dolphins have evolved a very similar body plan - and unlike fish, they are warm-blooded, air-breathing mammals with a totally different evolutionary background. With their sleek, torpedo-like bodies and stabilizing fins, fish are optimized for life in water. The classic example, Dixon said, is the fish shape.

Rise of the planet of the apes release date