Familial-responsibility for raising infants to functional adulthood would appear to be in the news. I may have a take hotter than Vance's and Weinstein's: the placenta was a degeneration, on our way to sentience. We humans, especially, lay eggs without the shell.
If we consider mammals before the Chicxulub hit, I understand we had a good deal of biodiversity, at least as much as them dinos. Placentals existed, but in South America so did marsupials. Chicxulub selected for tiny critters which could hide out and didn't require a lot of breathable air. It didn't select for intelligence - nor, I'll posit, for intelligence potential.
How dumb are marsupials, exactly? The koala is famously smooth brained but it has One Job, eating eucalyptus. How's Tasmania's Devil? How was the thylacine; how were the South American beasties? Absent a, you know, Hyperion-sized asteroid are we sure that tiny nocturnal lemurs would end up ahead of, say, a bipedal kangaroo-analogue?
The vertebrate sentients we meet from other planets could end up being marsupial.
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