Human and ape evolution questions...?

Question

so i've been studying human evolution and i need a little clarification on common ancestory between humans and other apes. When i talk of the line of hominids starting with lucy, then A. boisei, ergaster, hablis, erectus, and ending with homo sapiens..i guess this is the evolutionary path that humans took from a common ancestor while apes took another path. am i correct? All these hominids have some human characteristics and are not completey apelike. So, even though we are called apes (because of taxonomy?) we didn't evolve from them..we just evolved along with them branching off on the giant bush of life...so doe that mean that apes(chimps, etc) now are fully evolved?

Answer 1

nothing is ever finished,it is an ongoing process,evolution ,is merely change in response to environmental pressure ,sometimes it fails and species are lost,human is not the ultimate goal of evolution,this world would have survived even if our species had failed..............tom

Answer 2

I don't believe anything is 'fully evolved'- not even humans - the changes continue.

Answer 3

There has never been a shred of evidence to suggest that any of the above have a link to us humans. Evolution cannot jump the species barrier no matter what species we are talking about, there is not one instance in the fossil record of species change since the Cambrian explosion, and that, according to the experts in the field was 530 million years ago. Lylo Lil.

           PS I would like to know who gave me the thumb down, but more important, Why?

Answer 4

Think of it a a highway.

We (humans and apes) started at the same point about 13 million years ago. That's when our common ancestor split off from the lessor apes. About 8 million years ago there was another fork in the road and we and the apes went our own ways. Then came the various species you mentioned. At times there seems to have been more then one species existing at the same time.Call this side roads off the main artery. Some were dead ends (Neandertals are a good example) while others continued.

As for the apes, they evolved to fit niches in the ecology. They aren't going to "evolve into humans" as this would require retracing the road they came down, then following the path we took. It may be possible to make a shortcut via genetic engining but natural selection doesn't work that way.

This is all being done without a compass or a roadmap. We don't know where we'll end up

Answer 5

It is very likely that each of these are separate species or likely multiple species in the case of habilis and erectus or perhaps others.  That means they have their own lineage and none of them necessarily are human ancestors.  Our lineage most likely includes some relative of afarensis or Lucy, then some species of habilis, then ergaster or some species of erectus.  The exact branch is not certain because there aren't enough hominid fossils to say for sure if one is an ancestor or a close relative.

The species all branched off some branch that includes common ancestors with modern humans.  The farther back that they shared a common ancestor, the less human they are.  They are all apes and the biological distinction between ape and human doesn't really exist except that we are much smarter so we get to write the book.  A chimp is much closer to a human than it is to a gorilla but it isn't any less of an ape?  Why do you suppose that is if it isn't prejudice in the eyes of humans.

All animals are fully evolved.  We didn't fall out of a tree and crawl around until we learned to walk.  We were a creature that ventured farther and farther from trees until we no longer needed to shelter in them.  We were fully evolved creatures that spent half our time in trees.  That was our niche then and it changed gradually over time.  Africa was far to unforgiving to allow anything to exist that wasn't fully evolved.  The niches just slowly expanded or changed for each of the many species of apes that existed.