All humans suddenly vanish from the world tomorrow. 200,000 years later the internet is invented again. What present-day species did the inventors evolve from?
If you say chimpanzees, well you’re probably correct, but you’re no fun.
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Spiders.
Actually, if I remember correctly, spiders are the ones that come after humans in the Cthulhu mythos.
Interesting. Can you back that up? The video wasn’t quite as informative or insightful as I was expecting.
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Haha, the video was just about letting eight-legged insects take over the world.
Hmm…
This story:
Features a character who is forcefully body-swapped by a race that previously inhabited Earth and is capable of swapping consciousnesses with any race at any place or time…
Anyway, in this story, the narrator learns of many of the past and future races that live on earth and… other places.
The work appears to be in public domain:
And alas, I was wrong. The arachnids preceded humanity and the beetles succeed us.
Spoiler blur in case you wanted to read the story as intended
I learned—even before my waking self had studied the parallel cases or the old myths from which the dreams doubtless sprang—that the entities around me were of the world’s greatest race, which had conquered time and had sent exploring minds into every age. I knew, too, that I had been snatched from my age while another used my body in that age, and that a few of the other strange forms housed similarly captured minds. I seemed to talk, in some odd language of claw-clickings, with exiled intellects from every corner of the solar system.
There was a mind from the planet we know as Venus, which would live incalculable epochs to come, and one from an outer moon of Jupiter six million years in the past. Of earthly minds there were some from the winged, star-headed, half-vegetable race of palaeogean Antarctica; one from the reptile people of fabled Valusia; three from the furry pre-human Hyperborean worshippers of Tsathoggua; one from the wholly abominable Tcho-Tchos; two from the arachnid denizens of earth’s last age; five from the hardy coleopterous species immediately following mankind, to which the Great Race was some day to transfer its keenest minds en masse in the face of horrible peril; and several from different branches of humanity.
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I’m not wholly convinced that some claw clicking beetles would come to dominate all other earthly species, but hey you’re the front runner so far!
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I suppose it would depend upon what type of cataclysmic event happened, that caused all humans to suddenly vanish. Thanos? Monster asteroids? FOABs? Disease? All oxygen removed from the troposphere?
Some humans are in space. Are they effected? What about cryonicists?
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I’m thinking humankind disappeared with everything left as is. Except all cats and dogs are outside, otherwise it’s too sad 
Or if there are at least one male and one female astronaut in space right now they get a chance to return to earth and repopulate but that’s rough.
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Leaving aside primates, then I’d bet on this as our future -
Look at their paws - they can open and manipulate things pretty easily already. They are at the point our own ancestors were probably 5-10 million years ago with still being in the trees for safety but doing a lot on the ground. I don’t think it would take terribly much adaptation to get them really bipedal and using their paws more for tools. And their range is wide, good generalists. They seem to do as well in FL and here in NC as up in parts of Canada I’ve been to.
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I could post something religious here but I’m smart enough not to 
@host I did it I controlled myself
it all depends on cats. …hear me out.
ravens are smart, social and curious enough to do something with their lives… so are parrots which can live a lot longer, but they have the disadvantage of living in places that didn’t change that much and no reason to change themselves. ravens and crows alrerady have the numbers, live where humans did, so they will have a very new unnatural environment to interact with. humans decimated most of the fauna, so the only natural predator will be the above mentioned cats. are cats a threat to ravens ? if not, without predators, the birds can become filghtless and a lot bigger (there’s the Kakapo of course, but they are now stuck in New Zealand - became flightless too soon for world domination and it is a damn shame if you ask me)
but 200k years is nowhere near enough for such a dramatic change in any existing species (unless the dolphins are hiding something… but good luck inventing internet under water).
so my bet is a society of weird skinny puzzle solving penguins.
cats won’t change, because why would they…
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Giant, flightless crows and ravens. Love it. Idk whether to picture Big Bird with black feathers or Brandon Lee of “the Crow” 
.
Love your rationale here. I wouldn’t necessarily rule out 200k years though, as without humans some species could potentially be poised for some rapid growth events. Immediate effects of our disappearance would cause our prey, especially livestock like cows and chickens, to expand unchecked for quite some time. Canines might be the first benefactors of all this free meat, though the rapid evolution starts to kick in when scarcity of prey forces a species to move from one place to another… who knows how future ice ages etc will shake things up?
That said, rational ideas aren’t necessary here lol. No wrong answers.
@bucfanpaka he probably already did invent the internet in that timeline 
. Those are the paws of a winner.
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very well then - ants, but each has a walkie talkie. imagine a hive mind capable of near instant information flow. they’d be unstopable!
or even better - Portal Wasps
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I think it’s gonna be these cuties
JK but actually the reason I thought of this scenario last night was because I read a story recently that when Pablo Escobar was killed, his hippos were released into the wild and apparently have been multiplying and are doing quite well for themselves in the Colombian ecosystem. If they aren’t eradicated by humans they will eventually become a technically different species than the African ones. Crazy thought.
Also here’s a pic of a bear I just drew. Maybe that means I liked Paka’s answer the most.
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Are there actually Tanuki running wild around FL & NC? 
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Not the same species, just common raccoons here, but couldn’t resist using Tom Nook there to illustrate. 
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Ants.
They’re amazing structural engineers, so would likely build slaughter pits for land based mammals to fall in to and then swarm them with their overwhelming numbers.
Laying all the network cables would be no problem for them at all too
Although they wouldn’t call the internet the World Wide Web due to their longstanding dislike for spiders… they’d call it the World Wide Tunnel instead.
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