• Question: How did humans evolve from apes?

    Asked by nataliel to Amy, Grant, Martin, Shawn, Usman on 11 Mar 2013.
    • Photo: Amy Tyndall

      Amy Tyndall answered on 11 Mar 2013:

      When people tell you that humans evolved from apes, the first image that springs to mind is evolving directly from the monkey you see in the zoo to the person you are today. This isn’t entirely true. We share lots of common traits with them (including DNA), but it is thought that waaaaay back in the past, we were evolving in a similar way, sharing a common ancestor, and this then ‘split’ into two different evolutionary paths – one that resulted in the apes we see in the wild today, and another that resulted in us human beings.

      I guess this was probably a result of some form of natural selection – creatures with certain biological traits survive in an environment that kills others that don’t have it, and so they reproduce and pass on the ‘good’ DNA, and the process repeats itself until you essentially have a species that looks completely different to what it was originally.

    • Photo: Grant Kennedy

      Grant Kennedy answered on 11 Mar 2013:

      Amy has nailed this, the “common ancestor” is the key bit, so we didn’t actually evolve from apes.

      A similar thing that you’re probably more used to is different breeds of dogs. Even though a huge great dane and a tiny chihuahua look completely different, they’re still both dogs that are descended from wolves. The reason they’re so different is that people have bred them to make them bigger, smaller, fluffier, cuter, uglier, and so on. It’s a kind of artificial evolution. Even though these changes in dogs were made by humans, they way it happened is basically the same as for humans and apes, but for us changes were made by evolution for real.

      So long ago there was the common ancestor species, but imagine if these guys then got split up and were living in two different places. Each group had different evolutionary pressures due to where they were living, (so different food and weather), which meant that they evolved in different ways. In one case they ended up as apes, and in the other they ended up as us!

      g

    • Photo: Shawn Domagal-Goldman

      Shawn Domagal-Goldman answered on 12 Mar 2013:

      Sllllloooooowwwwlllllyyy. There were a lot of key steps in the evolution of humans. We evolved walking on two feet, we evolved bigger brains, and we evolved a social structure heavily dependent on communities. One of the interesting things to me (because I study planetary climate) is that many of these changes were driven by changes in the climate, which made it better for us to be a really smart and adaptable species.

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