• Question: How did we evolve and monkeys did not? Are chimps in the stages of evolution?

    Asked by dizzyg12 to Simon, Susan on 22 Nov 2013.
    • Photo: Simon Langley-Evans

      Simon Langley-Evans answered on 22 Nov 2013:

      All of the species on the Earth are still going through evolution. Evolution describes how a species changes because it adapts to the environment around it. If it doesn’t adapt it becomes extinct. Chimps are showing signs that they have complex communication and simple tool use so who knows, given another half million years, they could become more like us.

      Why did we evolve to be the most amazing super beings on the planet? Well, I would say that was just luck. Humans and the great apes (chimps and gorillas) have common ancestors. For some reason the bit of the family which became us got some sort of advantage from standing on two legs and having a bigger brain. Maybe it meant that we could search for food away from the forests and so we had less competition from monkeys. By standing upright we could see predators coming from further away (like meerkats do!) and escape. Because of that we could extend the land we covered, reproduce successfully. Being better fed would give us the space to make more use of those better brains and work with tools, communicate in a more sophisticated manner. The rest is history…

    • Photo: Susan Skelton

      Susan Skelton answered on 22 Nov 2013:

      This is a brilliant question, dizzy!
      Everything that is alive on Earth is going through evolution. So we are evolving, monkeys are evolving, and chimps are evolving, too.

      Actually, humans did not evolve from monkeys; humans and monkeys both evolved from the same ancestor who is now extinct. And since scientists have recently learned how to compare the genetic makeup of species, we’ve found out that about 98.5% of the genes in people and chimpanzees are identical!

      This means chimps are the closest living biological relatives to humans, but it does not mean that humans evolved from chimps. It does mean that humans and modern apes (gorillas and chimpanzees) both evolved from the same ancestor – our great, great, great, great, ………. , great Grandad 🙂 So you and that hairy gorilla in the zoo are very, very distant cousins! Therefore we are related to monkeys and chimps, but we didn’t evolve from them.

      Modern humans differ from apes in many important ways. Human brains are larger and more complicated; people have elaborate forms of communication and culture; and people walk upright, can manipulate very small objects, and can speak.

      Most scientists believe our common ancestor lived about 5 to 8 million years ago. After this, the two species broke off into separate family lines, one which eventually evolved into gorillas and chimps; the other evolved into us humans.

      In the millions of years between the life of our common ancestor and us, at least 12 different species of human-like creatures have existed. We know this because we’ve found fossils of these creatures. Many of these species were also close relatives but not actual ancestors of modern humans. They didn’t leave behind any children and just died out.

      We still don’t know how many different types of early humans there have been, but new fossils are being discovered all the time. The story of how we became who we are today is getting clearer every day.

Comments