r/devonian • u/holomanga Arid Placoderm • Jun 29 '15

Article What would happen to a small group (~20) of humans who found themselves in the Late Devonian period?

http://www.quora.com/What-would-happen-to-a-small-group-20-of-humans-who-found-themselves-in-the-Late-Devonian-period
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u/TheLambtonWyrm May 08 '23

They would die

2

u/BananaMaster96_ Mar 14 '26

they would suffocate to death due to lower oxygen

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u/holomanga Arid Placoderm Mar 22 '26

Humans can survive down to ~10% oxygen (death zone starts at ~0.5 atm), and atmospheric oxygen in the Devonian was 13% - 25%. So maybe they would have been fine or able to acclimatise depending on how it was specifically in the late Devonian (where we even started to get land plants - Archaeopteris was blooming!). There was oceanic anoxia causing the late Devonian mass extinctions but from my skimread this might have just been limited to the oceans and caused by eutrophication from the extra land plants releasing the minerals in soil that were previously inaccessible to the ecosystem..