Question: Why and how did monkeys turn into humans

Roan Haggar answered on 11 Nov 2020:

This is more a question for biologists than for physicists, but I’ll try my best to answer!
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Monkeys didn’t actually turn into humans, although we are related to them! Monkeys and humans both evolved from the same thing, a species that lived millions of years ago, which we call a ‘common ancestor’.
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Rather than thinking of monkeys as something we came from (like our parents or grandparents), it’s better to think of monkeys like our cousins. Just like you have the same grandparents as your cousins, we evolved from the same thing as monkeys. It’s likely that this common ancestor looked a bit like a monkey, but it wasn’t the same as the monkeys we see today.
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Evolution is a very slow process. It takes place because of something called ‘natural selection’, which is caused by the fact that all members of a species are different. Some of these members will be more likely to survive and have children, meaning that the characteristics of these members will be passed on to the next generation.
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For example, humans are more intelligent than our ancestors from millions of years ago. This is because our more intelligent ancestors would be more likely to survive, as they could collect more food and build more tools. So, they lived a long time and had more offspring, which meant that the next generation were also more intelligent. Over millions of years, these small changes can lead to an entire new species forming.
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It’s a difficult idea to get your head round, but I hope this helps!