• Question: why do people say we are made from monkey / manoth

    Asked by anon-276911 on 22 Jan 2021.
    • Photo: Michael Nolan

      Michael Nolan answered on 22 Jan 2021:

      I hope I understood the question. It is common to say that we are descended from apes (or even monkeys) and this then makes people think of there were apes at some time in the past which evolved over time into modern humans.
      However, what happens is if you go back in time there was a point at which humans and apes shared a common ancestor (the LCA, last common ancestor) and both evolved, initially in very small ways, from that.

      https://www.researchgate.net/publication/285933702_The_arboreal_origins_of_human_bipedalism/figures?lo=1&utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic

      Eventually they became different from each other.
      We then say that the species have diverged (or separated) when they can no longer mate with each other to produce offspring.
      Dawkins book on Evolution is a really good explainer of this

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