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Q&A

5 million years in the future and Humans are still the same: how is that possible?

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Setting: Earth, 5 million years in the future (see note 1). Continents are still recognizable but sensibly altered by tectonic movements. Climate is drastically changed. Civilization does not exist anymore, having already risen and fallen many times (see note 2), but humans are still around. Humans have evolved into a plethora of species that, although partially capable of interbreeding, are on the verge of becoming different kinds of humanities. Among them, however, one is morphologically identical to present-day humans: how is that possible?

I know it's improbable that a species may exist as a contiguous entity for many millions of years, so WHAT SPECIAL CONDITIONS ARE TO BE MET TO MAKE HOMO SAPIENS A LIVING FOSSIL SPECIES?

Note 1: I'm willing to reduce this timespan to at least 2.5 million years if I need to.

Note 2: In this setting human civilization on Earth rose to space travel levels and then fell to pre-industrial or even prehistoric levels at least a few times, so while no Homo species on Earth is technologically advanced there may be, somewhere, somehow, space humans which have retained varying degrees of techonological capability. They may have a part in the explanation, but I would appreciate a justification as "natural" as possible.

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This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/101096. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

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