Question: How have humans evolved from monkeys?

Sophie Williams answered on 5 Mar 2018:

Great question! So there has been many stages between primates (chimps, apes etc) and the modern human, each species becoming more “human” like along the way. The change from primate to human included our fingers becoming straighter as we didnt need them for clinging on to branches, our spine became more S- Shaped so that we could get a better centre of gravity to walk on two legs rather than four, our arms shortened and our legs got longer to allow us two walk on two legs, our heads became bigger to support bigger brains which allowed us to be able to use stone tools, our rib cages changed shaped so we could breathe better for long-distance walking and the bone you can feel above your eyebrows became flatter and shorter and less monkey-like!! There are lots of different examples of species. I’ll give you some examples, so you have the famous Lucy!! A Australopithecus afarensis (thats a tongue twister!!) she was quite chimp like in her features, very small, curved fingers probably for climbing trees when she wasn’t walking on the ground, then you have the Neanderthals who lived alongside modern humans who had much bigger heads than us and were much more muscly but not as clever!! Then you have homo sapiens which is our species that evolved about 200,000 years ago.