Evolution!!!?

Question

How could I answer the question: "If apes evolved into humans, why are there still apes?" In the evolutionary trend, most older "versions" went extinct, like neanderthals being displaced by modern man, so why aren't the apes we supposedly evolved from gone?

Answer 1

If you look at an evolutionary tree you see that it typically splits into different branches. So if a ancestor of humans and apes gave rise to humans and apes, there should be human and apes around. Beats me what's illogical about it. While you are related to your cousins, they are not your anchestors - and neaderthals probably were cousins as well, not our ancestors.
The question does not make sense at all. It is equivalent of asking why are there still wolves around if dogs were bred from wolves. Or why there are still english people if the pilgrim fathers came to america. You wouldn't really expect that all english people die out unless a comet hits England or something like that

In addition older version not necessarily go extinct. Look at horseshoe crab, they haven't changed for millions of years. Bacteria are still around, and will continue to be around.

Answer 2

If you look at the phylogeny, or basically the species family tree that apes and humans are on, you will see that the apes and us are on different branches. Though we share a common ancestor, we both took different paths in our evolution from that point and ended up in different places.

Evolution within a lineage is anagenesis, which is what "apes evolved into humans" implies; however, the fossil record shows us that this was not the case. Instead, there was lineage splitting, or speciation, from a common ancestor.

Answer 3

About 3 million years ago, earth's changing climate caused some forest land to become plains. Some of our ancestors stayed in the shrinking forest. Others moved onto the plains. Maybe they wanted to, maybe they were forced to, but to the plains they went. While our forest dwelling ancestors could walk upright a little bit (modern chimps can too, but not for long), of those that lived in the plains, walking upright was a big benefit, because they could see farther over the tall grass and avoid predators better. Those that walked upright a little better had a better chance of surviving. Those that couldn't, well, aren't here anymore. Walking upright frees the hands to carry things, which paved the way for better hand articulation, which may have had a role in brain development, and therefore language, and so forth. Meanwhile, our relatives in the forest didn't change as much because they didn't have to.

Remember, we're still apes. We just walk upright and have bigger brains because those things helped us, and we outcompeted the plains-dwellers that didn't have them.

Answer 4

what scientists have found isnt proof that we evolved from apes, rather that apes are very similar to us and that we share a more recent common ancestor than most other species. species dont always completely evolve into a whole nother species too. usually only small, reproductively isolated populations of a certain species evolves while the rest of the species continues to live normally

Answer 5

It is inaccurate to say that we evolved from apes. We are a species of apes and (if natural selection is to be believed) we and the other apes evolved from a common ancestor. By way of an analogy, gorillas and chimps are our cousins, not our forbears.

Answer 6

Humans didn't descend from apes. They descended from the same ancestor that apes descended from. It's like we have the same ancestors somewhere along the line, and then both groups branched off and never had anything to do with each other again... resulting in two different speices.

Answer 7

The key words are:'modern apes' and ancient apes. The ancient apes were close related to ancient human.

Answer 8

allopatric speciation is the technical term for one possible mechanism for this. basically this works when you start with one group of creatures that gets geographically separated and then if theyre subject to diffrent environmental pressures they genetically start to drift apart to eventually become diffrent species. a readable article as to how it all works is given below:

Answer 9

I would say maybe, that since there are differenc species of primates, we may have come from only one species that managed to evolve. if that makes sense