> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.irvidas.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Oxford Says Octopuses Could Rule Earth After Us - URL: https://www.irvidas.com/oxford-says-octopuses-could-rule-earth-after-us/ - Published: 2026-08-29T08:28:27.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-29T08:28:27.000Z - Author: Irvidas Bulotas - Tags: Marine Planet Ask most people which animal takes over if humans vanish and they'll say chimpanzees. Same hands, same tools, same brain layout. An Oxford professor thinks that's exactly wrong — and his reasoning is better than the headline suggests. ### The apes go down with us Tim Coulson, a zoologist at the University of Oxford, laid out the argument in his 2024 book *The Universal History of Us*. His objection to great apes is brutally simple. Chimpanzees and bonobos are intelligent, have opposable thumbs, use tools, and can walk upright — but they're so similar to us, and so exposed to the same environment, that they'd likely go extinct alongside us. Whatever kills humans — climate collapse, disease, war — kills the animals living in our conditions, eating our food, breathing our air. Being like us is a liability in a scenario where being us was fatal. Birds are out for a different reason: he argues they lack the fine motor skills needed to construct a civilisation. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a6/10/a6105552-ef05-458c-9aa7-d8e9d2490f4f/content/images/2026/08/1-18.png) ### Why octopuses instead Coulson's case rests on a specific combination that almost nothing else on Earth has: problem-solving, communication through flashes of colour, object manipulation, and precise camouflage. The physiology matters as much as the behaviour. An octopus has an advanced neural structure and a decentralised nervous system — most of its neurons sit in its arms rather than a central brain, meaning each limb processes information semi-independently. That's not just a fun fact. It's a fundamentally different architecture for intelligence than any vertebrate has, and Coulson argues it suits an unpredictable world. He goes further than most would. Larger species — some reaching around 20 feet and 110 pounds — could potentially build underwater communities resembling the cities we build on land, though he estimates it might take hundreds of thousands or even millions of years. He's even floated the possibility that they could eventually evolve to breathe out of water and hunt land animals. He's clear this is a thought experiment rather than a forecast. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a6/10/a6105552-ef05-458c-9aa7-d8e9d2490f4f/content/images/2026/08/2-17.png) ### The problem nobody in the headlines mentions Here's what makes or breaks this idea, and it isn't intelligence. Octopuses live between one and five years depending on species. They're solitary. And they don't raise their young — most species die shortly after reproducing, with the mother guarding the eggs and then dying before they hatch. That is a catastrophic obstacle, and I think it's the real story. **Civilisation isn't built by smart individuals. It's built by inherited knowledge.** Everything humans have — language, metallurgy, medicine, law — exists because one generation hands its discoveries to the next and the next starts from a higher floor. An octopus that solves a problem brilliantly takes the solution to its grave within a few years, and its offspring start from zero. You could put a genius in every reef on Earth and get no civilisation at all, because nothing accumulates. There's a second, harder limit that Coulson has addressed: energy. He's raised tidal power and hydrothermal vents as possibilities, but the underlying problem is that intelligence doesn't get you far without power to sustain it. And there's no fire underwater — no fire means no smelting, no metals, no ceramics. An ocean civilisation has to invent an entirely different materials science from scratch. ### My take I don't think the octopus scenario is silly. I think the popular version of it is backwards. The reporting frames octopuses as underrated because they're smarter than we assume. But their intelligence isn't really in question — a veined octopus carrying coconut halves around to build a shelter later is textbook tool use, and they've been picking locks and escaping tanks in labs for a century. What they lack is **time and company**. Fix the lifespan and the solitude and you'd have a genuine contender, because evolution has already handed them the hardware. And that reframes the whole question. What actually made humans dominant wasn't the brain. It was living long enough to teach, and caring enough to bother. Those are the traits people never list when they talk about human exceptionalism, and they're the only two the octopus is missing. One more thing worth saying plainly: ecologists have warned that pollution, warming oceans, microplastics and overfishing could narrow evolutionary options before any of this has time to happen. We might remove the successor before we remove ourselves. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a6/10/a6105552-ef05-458c-9aa7-d8e9d2490f4f/content/images/2026/08/3-14.png) ### The verdict - Apes are ruled out because whatever kills us likely kills them too. - Octopuses have the dexterity, the problem-solving and an alien neural architecture. - They lose on lifespan, solitude and the absence of parental care — no knowledge transfer. - No fire underwater means no metals, so any ocean civilisation looks nothing like ours. The octopus already has the brain. What it doesn't have is a grandmother — and that, not the brain, is what built us.