Project Vision 21

Dinosaurs ruled the Earth for hundreds of millions of years, and, according to one scientist, that reign still affects all human beings today in an incredible and almost unimaginable way: one of the direct consequences of the existence of dinosaurs is that humans have shorter lifespans than we otherwise might have had.

In a recent study, Dr. João Pedro de Magalhães, a microbiologist at the University of Birmingham, argues that during the Mesozoic Era (that is, between 252 and 66 million years ago), when reptiles dominated life on Earth, mammals had to "choose" short lives that allowed them to reproduce as quickly as possible (before being eaten by dinosaurs).

Specifically, “Some early mammals were forced to live at the bottom of the food chain and probably spent 100 million years—during the age of dinosaurs—evolving to survive through rapid reproduction,” explains de Magalhães.

He adds, “That long period of evolutionary pressure has, I propose, an impact on how humans age,” referring to what he calls the “longevity bottleneck hypothesis,” meaning that because of dinosaurs, early mammals, under prolonged evolutionary pressure, lost or deactivated genes associated with longevity.

As a consequence, mammals lack the ability to repair their bodies the way reptiles do, their teeth stop growing (with a few exceptions), and it is even possible that cancer affects mammals more than other species that have kept their longevity genes active. And all of that thanks to dinosaurs.

Obviously, we cannot “blame” dinosaurs for intentionally reducing the human lifespan. At the same time, it is fascinating to think about how different human life might have been if dinosaurs had never existed. Perhaps we would have enjoyed extraordinarily long and healthy lives, just as the Sumerians and other ancient cultures once imagined.

And that leads us to consider that already in the Epic of Gilgamesh (the oldest surviving literary work, probably around 4,000 years old), the Sumerians reflected on the idea that although personal immortality is impossible for humans, the millennial continuation of the human species is possible through reproduction.

So, while dinosaurs were unaware that their mere presence was shortening the lives of the mammals that, in turn, were forced to reproduce to survive, the Sumerians and other ancient cultures were not only aware that the search for immortality was unattainable, except perhaps through descendants who remember us.

All of this led me to think that we, the humans of the 21st century, may be just as unaware as the dinosaurs were of the impact that our mere existence will have on the future life of this planet millions of years from now. At the same time, it appears that we have lost awareness of our own mortality.