Ants are from the other branch of creatures with bilateral symmetry. That fork would have occurred before the Cambrian explosion, so that's at least a half a billion years ago. That's a long time!
Which is relatively new compared to geological or cosmological time.
It's a while even on a geological time scale. By comparison, Pangea was a mere 175 million years ago. Half a billion years is 1/9th of the age of the Earth. Another half billion years in the future, geological changes are expected to have ended the carbon cycle, killing most plant life on Earth.