Question: did we envolve from apes?
Keywords: apes, evolution, evolve, human evolution
Comments
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thank you!! for all the answers but i think i agree to miss Bridget Murphy.. that we are not involved in any apes or monkey..because we created separately..and i believed in human is created by creation not evolution.
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kby14 – may I ask – why do you think that humans were created by creation not evolution?
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Hi kby14. I think you may have misunderstood my answer.
There is an enormous amount of evidence that suggests humans and apes evolved from the same ancient ancestor. This evidence includes lots of fossils, DNA that is very similar between humans and other primates, and similarities in the body structure and behaviour of humans and other primates.
I was not suggesting in my answer that humans arose via creation. I was trying to highlight that humans evolved from an ancient ape-like ancestor, not from modern-day monkeys and apes. There is no scientific evidence that humans were created.
kby14
Yes – that is what the evidence suggests. Or at least we both evolved separately from some animal in the past – what’s called a “common ancestor”. They, in turn, evolved from other things and so on.
Aside from all the science evidence (is that what you’re asking about, actually?) – have you ever looked at an ape’s face on a TV documentary or at the zoo? When you do, it’s not hard to believe we’re related.
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This is what I understand of evolution. I think Bridget will come up with a better answer than me.
So far, what scientists have found in fossil records suggests that we have evolved from something that looked like an ape. This is a different ape from all the apes like chimpanzees, gorillas, gibbons, and, orang-utans which are modern apes. Humans at the moment are classed as a modern ape.
When it comes to evolutionary theory, it isn’t saying that humans evolved from the chimpanzee or gorilla but rather that we humans share a common ancestor with chimpanzees, gorillas and orang-utans. And from that one common ancestor, different groups of apes evolved differently resulting in the variety we have today.
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Yes, the scientific evidence points to people and apes being descended from common ancestors.
There are people who believe otherwise, but that is in the area of religion not science. People sometimes do have different behaviours (almost beliefs) in different circumstances. For example, I still believe it is OK to torment my brothers, but I do not believe we/I can do that to other people.
Scientists believe that all our ideas are testable. Isaac Newton thought of his Laws of Motion hundreds of years ago. Albert Einstein showed that those ideas are “wrong” because they were incomplete and could be improved. So science is all about finding the bits that are incomplete or “wrong” (usually “wrong” because they are based on incomplete information) and then improving those ideas.
When someone says “I do not care what evidence you show me, I will still believe in this idea”, that is not science.
You might look up the work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who was a French philosopher/scientist and a priest. He worked on evolution and saw science as a confirmation of his religeous beliefs.
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Some one asked me this exact same question in my TAFE class last week – although she asked if we evolved from monkeys. In fact, this student asked: “If we evolved from monkeys, why do monkeys still exist today?”
This is where the confusion comes from. The answer is: no, we did not evolve from apes or monkeys (or chimps or gorillas), but yes, humans probably share a common ancestor with these animals. This common ancestor would have lived in Africa about 4-8 million years ago (the exact time is debated amongst scientists). Evidence suggests modern-day chimps, apes, gorillas and humans all evolved from this same common ancestor, but humans definitely didn’t evolve from apes.
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