What If Man Didn’t Descend From Apes?

Are we sure that man comes from the monkey ? Since Darwin revolutionized the history of humanity, with his theory of evolution, this question still has no answer today. Of course, having arrived in the 21st century, we now know that evolution is a fact rather than a theory. Yet there are some misinterpretations that continue to be passed down. Let’s try to shed some light on the subject in this article.

Darwin’s theory of evolution

For example, it is false to claim that Darwin said that homo sapiens sapiens derives from the monkey. The theory of evolution challenged the traditional scientific projection of creationism, that living things would appear on Earth as we know them today. In the theory of the famous British naturalist, living beings have instead been shaped by various factors related to evolution. And, among these “variables”, natural selection plays a leading role.

And not only. Charles Darwin dared to include human beings in his projection, introducing the idea that they did not derive from a biblical fable , but rather belonged to an evolutionary line modeled through a process of humanization . Specifically, Darwin wrote these words in The Origin of Species (1859), one of his most famous books:

Is it true that man comes from the monkey?

Once the core of the theory of evolution has been deciphered roughly, it should be noted that for Darwin all creatures evolved from other beings. So, even the human being before was an animal like many others. And, in particular, a primate.

At the end of the 19th century, the press and scientific creationists rejected the evolutionary matrix of Darwinian thought , often ridiculing the same scholar. A cartoon is famous that portrays Darwin with a monkey’s body, making fun of the fact that his ideas were born from an “inferior” mind. These  detractors, however, were guilty of misunderstanding that theory. Unfortunately, the same thing still happens today.

Evolution, supported by fossil finds, shows that our ancestors were primates for millions of years, but they did not come from apes. Or, at least, from none of the species still living. We share common ancestors with these mammals, but we must go back thousands of years to go back to them, in proportion to the  differences that appear clearly between man and apes.

In this regard, it is known that the ancestor we have in common with chimpanzees lived in Africa six million years ago. With the rest of the apes, such as the gibbons, the common ancestor we know of is Alesi.  This is how a skull of an animal that lived 13 million years ago was baptized.

The tree of evolution

It is not wrong to remember that evolution is like a tree.  This is how Darwin represented him in the first illustrations that supported his lessons. The so-called phylogenetic trees . The branches of the evolutionary tree have developed in the same way, but only a few have points in common.

Starting from here, we understand that, while  sharing part of the path with different animals similar to us, in the end man has embarked on a  journey of his own. Moving away from Alesi (13 million years ago) but also from the chimpanzee (6 million). This approach, the only correct one, goes against that wrong vision that we have, unfortunately, imprinted in the collective imagination. Evolution  should not be seen as a sequence, a ladder (like the famous row of hominids), but as a tree.

Orangutans or bonobos are n’t just a couple of steps below us. The anthropocentric view is one of the causes of our contempt for “inferior” beings and which often leads some species to extinction.

All animals have evolved equally, although each of them has adapted to a specific ecosystem and functions. The same human being could hardly survive in the habitat of a dolphin, or in that of a bacterium or a Bengal tiger.

Remember that evolution is a tree with a branch for each species and excludes no one. This is also the demonstration that our feelings, thoughts and everything that makes us human also makes us animals.