Humanity's fingerprint can be seen across the planet today, from the towering skyscrapers that define our modern metropolises to the pyramids and other ancient monuments of our past. Human activity also marks our sprawling open fields of agriculture and the roads that link everything together. But what would the world look like if humans had never existed?
Some scientists paint a picture of a pristine wilderness and an abundance of species, from the familiar to the not so familiar. "I think it would be a much more vegetated place with a wealth of animals, of large size spread across all continents except Antarctica," Trevor Worthy, a paleontologist and associate professor at Flinders University in Australia, told Live Science.
A world without modern humans might also mean that our extinct human relatives, such as the Neanderthals, would still be around. And they, undoubtedly, also would have changed the landscape.
