• Question: If we evolved from monkeys how come their are still monkeys?? xx

    Asked by to Daren, Lynne, Phillip, Simon on 23 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Daren Fearon

      Daren Fearon answered on 23 Jun 2014:

      We didn’t evolve from the monkeys that you see now but we evolved from a common ancestor about 6-8 million years ago.

    • Photo: anon

      anon answered on 23 Jun 2014:

      As Daren said, we evolved from a common ancestor.
      Imagine there were two families of this common ancestor (to make it easier to think about) – one had longer tails and was better at jumping in trees and reaching the food on the top branches, whereas the other was slightly cleverer and worked out how to make tools to break open the food near the bottom of the tree so it didn’t matter that they couldn’t climb so high. There is enough food for everybody so both families survive.

      The tree climbing family evolve into better tree climbers and became the monkeys that we see today, whereas the other family selectively favoured characteristics that made their job on the ground easier and became more upright and turned into humans.

    • Photo: Phillip Manning

      Phillip Manning answered on 25 Jun 2014:

      We belong to a group of apes called primates. We share a common ancestor with monkeys many millions of years ago.

      As new species evolve, their ancestral stock does not always become extinct, and also multiple species can evolve independently of each other from a single species if a population is separated. Hence, many of our close relatives are still on our planet, although many are threatened species (e.g. Mountain Gorilla)

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