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Asked by lizzyp to Adam, Chris, Eleanor, Jessamyn, Sinead on 12 Nov 2013.
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Eleanor Holmes answered on 12 Nov 2013:
I’m not an evolutionary biologist so I don’t know all the subtleties, but I think that monkeys and humans (homo-sapiens) have a common ancestor (like a great great great….grandparent).
This idea of all the animals that there are right now existing before us and then one of them magically changing in to us is quite hard to imagine and it’s not what happened. Everything was very different all those hundreds of thousands of years ago and there were many other animals living that have since died out or evolved into the animals we see today.
The reason we simplify things by saying that we evolved from monkeys (strictly, primates) is because we share so very much of our DNA (what makes us US) with chimpanzees and other primates. We share more than 90% of our DNA structure with chimpanzees (and I think that figure might actually be much higher)
But the truth is that all mammals are part of the same family too. We share about 80% of our DNA with dogs and 50% of our DNA with bananas.
So everything on this planet is truly connected. The only things you’ll find that we aren’t in some way related to will have come from outer space.
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Adam Murphy answered on 12 Nov 2013:
Like Eleanor I’m also not an evolutionary biologist, but I have family who are!
What I learned from them is that evolution is tiny little changes over millions and millions of years. Each little change is a mutation. Maybe one day a mammal was born that was taller and stronger, so this mammal would live longer and have more children, all of which could be taller and stronger. Then one of that mammal’s great great grandchildren would have a bigger brain, and live longer, and pass its bigger brain onto its children. Then this creature eventually evolved into us
Meanwhile there was another set of mammals that mutated to be better at jumping through trees, or using tools. These then evolved into the monkeys we all know!
So monkeys are here because they evolved one way and we evolved another
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Christian Wirtz answered on 12 Nov 2013:
Hey,
I think the others answered this quite well already. We have a common ancestor with most animals (if you go back far enough, sometimes millions of years) so we didn’t come from the monkeys you see today but we came from the same origin.
As to why they don’t become humans, why should they? There is a common misconception that some species can be “more evolved” than others, but that is not true. Any species alive on this planet today is equally evolved as evolution only dictates the “survival of the fittest”. You may think that humans are fitter than monkeys or chickens, but somehow they are still around and there are many more chickens in the world than humans, they don’t have to work or pay tax, so who’s the fitter one here?
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