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[–] 2 points 1 week ago

Not just people, it goes back all the way to the origin of life, whether that happened here or elsewhere and life just somehow ended up migrating here.

There's an unbroken hereditary line between each of us and cells that first tried to eat mitochondria and instead of breaking them down into one meal's worth of energy and nutrients, they ended up forming a symbiotic relationship, giving our ancestors (and us) the ability to take more energy from the oxygen that was slowly filling the atmosphere than it was causing damage and surviving the earliest known mass extinction as well as snowball earth.

Then our lineage was able to survive the Cambrian explosion, I'm guessing that's than brains evolved and suddenly life could control a wide variety of different shapes and body types and it did before settling in to the more common body types that survived to this day.

We survived countless mass extinctions, including all of the major ones, like massive asteroid impacts that rained molten glass all over the globe just from the rebound and made today's global warming seem quaint. Each of our ancestors was able to survive to the age of reproduction without getting eaten by the giant insects of the Carboniferous (though we were still in the water so kinda lucked out), we survived the early oceans/seas, the emergence of amphibians and reptiles. We survived the dinosaurs, probably as tiny nocturnal rodents. We survived past that when birds and mammals diversified after the dinosaurs were gone.

We survived when primates started changing the very nature of the game of survival, despite several other species getting a head start on populating the globe. For better or worse, we took the planet from Neanderthals, homo erectus, the Denisovans, the hobbit-like hominids, and any others that left Africa before us (not to mention dominated the competition inside Africa).

Only at that point did we start surviving the brutal history of our species and all the wars, famines, plagues, natural disasters, building collapses, personal disagreements that could have turned violent, religions, brutal rulers, collapses of civilization, and emergence of the next set of bandit or war lords.

Also billions of years of single-celled competition prior to that mitochondria symbiosis event.

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