Professor Tim Coulson could never imagine his dog inheriting the Earth, building a city of kennels with bones as currency.
But he could easily imagine octopuses squirming on land wearing breathing gear, rifle in hand (tentacle?) to hunt deer and sheep.
As much as this sounds like a cheesy sci-fi movie, this is what the University of Oxford biologist has suggested could be in Earth’s future.
But on one condition – humanity is extinct.
Coulson tells Metro that if humans were to be wiped off the map, it would pave the way for another species.
‘The fate of all species is extinction,’ The Universal History of Us author says. ‘In fact, 99.9% of all species that have ever existed are extinct. So humans will go extinct.’
If we don’t cause our own extinction first, the Earth’s dwindling CO2 or the sun’s inevitable explosion in a few billion years will get us first.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing, though (except for, well, us). ‘Imagine if that asteroid hadn’t crashed into Earth 66 million years ago,’ Coulson says.
‘Dinosaurs would still be around, and mammals would still be kind of rat-sized animals running around their feet.’
What would an octopus civilisation look like?
In much the same way that the dinosaurs’ dying off paved the way for us, our own vanishing act could pave the way for another species.
Coulson doubts it will be primates who will inherit the Earth. ‘My money is on octopus, they’re going to be the next civilisation builders,’ Coulson says.
An octopus society could use tidal power as an energy source, farming crustaceans and looking up and dreaming of what life is like on land.
‘They could make reverse scuba gear,’ Coulson says.
‘They’d need to create robots to help them move around. You never know, they could be hunting deer.
‘I’m not quite sure how they’d cook it underwater…. maybe a thermal vent.’
Are octopuses really that smart?
Octopuses, with their doughnut-shaped brain and hundreds of millions of neurons, have demonstrated intelligence in many ways.
Studies have shown them wriggling out of mazes, building carts and even stealing fish from laboratory containers and covering their tracks.
Evolution can be thought of as creatures adapting to their environment, with intelligence being less about getting an A on a test and more about the cognitive skills that help an animal survive.
Piero Amodio, a researcher in animal intelligence at Italy’s Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn research centre, tells Metro that no one knows why octopuses are smart.
‘There’s a lot of hype around them. They’re not smarter than a pig or a dolphin but we’re eager to make these comparisons,’ he says.
Among the explanations as to why animals become smart is the social intelligence hypothesis: a dolphin fares better in a pod than solo.
Or there’s the ecological intelligence hypothesis, that critters are forced to become savvy to avoid predators or know where to find food.
Yet, octopuses tend to be loners and don’t live long enough to form bonds. It’s not the size of their brains either, with most neurons being in their tentacles.
Amodio suggests that octopuses’ intelligence was years in the making.
About 275 million years ago, their ancestor lost their shell, which it used to stay buoyant. This allowed them to slither into cracks and hunt for prey.
It also meant other predators could hunt them more easily, forcing them to develop large brains to outsmart their foes.
Amodio warns that octopuses will always be limited, as they don’t have ‘overlapping generations’ like people do.
‘The life humans live today does not stem from a single brain,’ he says. ‘We didn’t learn from scratch how to light a fire or go to space – it took generations.’
So Coulson says that octopuses may evolve to live longer.
Humans evolved at a breakneck speed after Africa dried up a few million years ago. A similar environmental push could happen to octopuses.
How did humans get so smart?
Believe it or not but humans are intelligent, Dr Emma Bird, a palaeoanthropologist at the Natural History Museum, tells Metro.
Our ancestors appeared about seven million years ago, when some apelike creatures in Africa began to walk on two legs. We used to be one of many human species, like Neanderthals.
‘While aspects of our cognition played a part in our ultimate survival over all other human species, the story is much more complex and probably has elements of sheer luck,’ says Dr Bird.
While some human species struggled to survive, Homo sapiens used their ‘intelligence’ to chisel crude tools and form long-lasting bonds.
‘These more subtle and complex aspects of intelligence would have allowed them to more rapidly innovate and adapt their behaviour and culture as well as share cultural knowledge between groups,’ she says.
Dr Bird stresses that humanity is not a story of dominance – for one, we’re 20% Neanderthal because of interbreeding.
‘In that sense, Neanderthals have not vanished entirely; they have shaped who our species is today,’ she adds.
If not octopuses, what else could succeed us? A Planet of the Apes-style world is too boring. Dolphins, meanwhile, lack the dexterity to make tools.
His next bet would be crabs, as ‘you can imagine them doing all sorts of stuff with their pincers’, but they would need to work on their intelligence.
‘It’s fun to speculate about,’ Coulson adds, ‘and the great thing about it is, we’ll be extinct.
‘So when all of this happens, no one can prove me wrong.’
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